


Shades of Blue: Intermission

by Amelia_E_Adler



Series: Shades of Blue [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Air Force, Future Fic, Gen, Military, OC, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:21:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 57,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25203118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amelia_E_Adler/pseuds/Amelia_E_Adler
Summary: Continuation of Midnight Blue and Azure. Captain Alice Boyd finds herself in a completely unexpected situation without any clear exit strategy. Can she face her own destiny and come out victorious?
Series: Shades of Blue [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/762096
Comments: 11
Kudos: 11





	1. Epigraph

**Author's Note:**

> This is, you could say, part 2.5 of my Shades of Blue series (first installment was "Midnight Blue", the second "Azure"). This part will be a little different--you will see why as soon as you start reading. It will also be a lot shorter than the other two. If you haven't read the first two parts, I strongly encourage you to do so, for there are many references to them in this story (especially "Azure"). Good news is that I already finished it--I will be publishing it in more or less regulars intervals, though, not all at once, and I am already starting the next and (probably) last installment in the series.
> 
> As always, this is a tale I've told to myself hundreds of times in different ways and versions, and this one is just as new for me as it is for you. Writing it brings me immeasurable joy, but I cannot deny that seeing people actually reading these stories, especially those who come back and comment, is equally immeasurably motivating. You folks are the wind beneath my wings (; Please do leave a comment if you've read it, even if it's just to critique me!
> 
> I do not currently have a beta so all mistakes are on me.
> 
> Please note that the story is supposed to be canonical to the TV shows/movies. I have never read the books.
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the Stargate universe or franchise and derive no financial gains from writing and publishing my story. This is purely for entertainment.
> 
> I encourage you to give a listen to the song from the Epigraph. It's amazing.
> 
> Enjoy (I hope)!

_She still remembers the time that was uncomplicated_

_But sure as the sun rise, she's seen things that you'll never see_

_Losses and heartaches amount to her strength_

_But oh, how they both take their toll_

_She's still here fighting_

_Better know there's life in her yet_

_Time will take us all, and turn us into stones_

_It leaves us with regrets and picks apart the threads_

_Hung over fragile bones_

_Let her go_

_I can't let her go_

_I can't let her go_

_Her hands tell the story of hardships that we'll never know_

_Her face is a map of a lifetime on well traveled roads_

_But those eyes tell nothing of a soul that is spared_

_A heart that is longing for death_

_She's still here fighting_

_Better know there's life in her yet_

_Time will take us all, and turn us into stones_

_It leaves us with regret, it picks apart the threads_

_Hung over fragile bones_

_Let her go_

_I can't let her go_

_I can't let her go_

_Let her go_

_I can't let her go_

_I can't let her go_

_Let her go, let her go, let her go_

_Let her go, let her go, let her go_

_[Rag’n’Bone Man, ‘Life in her yet’]_


	2. Chapter 1

The pearly white walls of the narrow corridor looked almost pink in the artificial light of lamps on the ceiling and standing on furniture. Not that there was all that much furniture—some decorative end tables, adorned with a couple plants and a bust of someone Alice should have probably known but couldn’t recognize nonetheless, and two plush chairs with intricate wooden backrests were all that could really fit. There were paintings on the walls, too—original masterpieces, surely, though Alice knew little of art and wouldn’t be able to tell if they had been cheap knockoffs.

She sat on one of the chairs on each side of the door and sweated silently in her full service dress uniform, complete with a cap, currently resting in her lap. She usually wore men’s rounder one instead of the women’s version, which was tapered on the sides; she thought it commanded more respect and was generally better recognizable, and since women in the Air Force were allowed to use either option, she chose the one that gave her more authority. She needed it—she was half an inch below five feet four (though she usually rounded it up when asked), slim, with big bright green eyes in a small face surrounded by coppery orange hair, coming down to the chin and tucked behind the ears as it was not long enough to pin in a bun yet—she didn’t look the part, and people tended to dismiss her, even just subconsciously. The uniform, the four rows of ribbons on her chest, the pilot wings above them, the men’s cap, it all served to add respectability to her meager frame.

Men and women in suits were walking up and down the corridor every now and then. They all threw her perfunctory glances and hurried along; they were used to seeing people in uniform, and in their eyes she wasn’t anyone special. They didn’t know, of course, who she was or what she came here to talk about. Alice recognized some of them from news clips and an occasional TV program she might have watched when on vacation. More often, though, the place was empty and Alice stared at the rug’s light brown and ecru pattern with unseeing eyes.

She started violently when the door next to her opened. A man in an elegant navy blue suit came out, turned to her, and said in a somewhat tired voice:

“You can go in, now.”

Alice nodded and stood up, putting her cap under her left arm. She took a deep breath and entered the room.

It was smaller than she had expected. With striped yellow and white wallpaper, cream carpet covering the wooden floor, white doors and windows, reddish-brown hangings and sand-colored sofas in the middle, it looked oddly muted. She only had to look at the hundred-and-forty years old desk and the man sitting behind it, though, to start feeling anxious and tense again.

She stopped in the middle of the room, straightened up to attention and saluted. The man stood up and returned the salute with appropriate gravity, and then walked around the desk and reached out to shake her hand. The guy in the navy blue suit announced her from a few paces away.

“Captain Alice Boyd, sir.”

“Thank you, Mike, that will be all,” he dismissed him with a nod and then turned back to Alice. “Hello, Captain, how are you doing?”

Alice had to swallow hard before she was able to unstuck her jaws and reply. “Good afternoon, Mr. President. I am very well, thank you. It is an honor to meet you, sir.”

“Please.” He waved towards the two sofas facing each other and sank into one of them. Alice sat down on the other, her back straight and rigid, the cap again in her lap. “How’s the shoulder?”

She flexed it reflexively, feeling a distant pang of pain and stiffness. “It’s alright, sir. It healed up very well, all things considered. It will be a few months until it’s back to one hundred percent, but that’s quite normal with these kinds of injuries.”

“Yes, I understand that this wasn’t your first time.” He gestured to her ribbon rack. “That’ll be a second device to your Purple Heart, won’t it?”

She nodded and cast down her eyes, not really knowing how to respond to that or what to say next. Thankfully, he wasn’t the least bit thrown by her silence.

“When General O’Neill told me you’d be coming here yourself, I was thrilled. I am always eager to hear from and meet the brave men and women serving in the Stargate Program. I read each report with avid interest, though of course I cannot read them _all_ , much as I’d like to. They are truly fascinating. I can’t quite comprehend how it must feel to be out there and face those dangers day in and day out, of course—but I can’t deny that it makes for one captivating read!”

She looked back up at him, feeling it would be rude to stare at the carpet for a prolonged period of time, and smiled, unsure if he expected her to say anything to that, but she kept her silence.

“I permitted myself the indulgence of reading up on your file, too, I must say,” he continued, undaunted. “Graduated high school at fourteen, college at nineteen. Commissioned to first lieutenant at twenty, became one of the very few female fighter pilots and went on to fly an F-302 by twenty-two. PhD at twenty-six, and then joined the Atlantis expedition to be a Jumper pilot, a scientist, and a member of a recon team. And all that before the age of thirty! That’s quite the resume. How in the world do you manage to do it all?” He shook his head, but he didn’t seem to require an answer because he went on after a short pause: “And now this. I’ve heard, of course, an abridged version of what happened from General O’Neill, but I’m really looking forward to hearing the full story from you. By the way, General O’Neill was very disappointed that he couldn’t be here today.” He patted the place next to him, as if to indicate that’s where O’Neill would be sitting if things were otherwise. “ _I_ wanted to invite my Chief of Staff or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the very least, but O’Neill assures me it’s best if the story is not shared with anyone without an immediate need-to-know. Do you agree with that?”

He sprung up the question on her quite unexpectedly, so she had to swallow again. “Yes, sir, I do.”

“These restrictions are somewhat frustrating,” he noted with a sour expression.

“Yes, sir. Nevertheless, they are necessary.”

“Right.” He suddenly stood up and Alice jumped to her feet, too. “Would you like something to drink before we start, Captain?”

“Yes, thank you, sir. A glass of water will be appreciated.” Her lips were dry like sandpaper.

“Nonsense, I’m not going to have you drink water,” he protested. “It’s not like you’re on duty, right? A glass of whisky, maybe?” He stood next to a small cabinet that hid a little bar inside, with many different bottles.

“No, thank you, sir, I’d rather have just the water.” Was it rude to refuse alcohol from the President of the United States? She didn’t know the protocol, but she disliked whisky and anyway it wouldn’t help her chapped lips.

“Alright, if you say so.” He poured a glass from a pitcher and handed it to her. He had whisky for himself.

“Thank you, sir.” She sipped the water, feeling the coolness spread over her esophagus like a balm. It felt really good.

He sat back down and Alice followed suit. For a short moment they didn’t talk, concentrated on their drinks.

“So, Captain. I want to hear it all, as it happened. Where do you want to start?”

She had had it all figured out, but now drew a blank on what exactly she had wanted to say and how. It was almost like giving a speech in a debate club back in high school—all of the pretty, carefully chosen words were gone, leaving her with the only choice: to improvise her way through this.

“At the beginning, I think,” she replied, putting the glass on the table next to the sofa. “It was mid-March—on Earth, at least—and I received a request—an order, really—to take a Jumper through the Stargate back to the SGC. Doctor Lee and his team were working on something on the one that we’d left at the Groom Lake after we had re-installed the Chair at the UN facility in Nevada—but they needed another Jumper for testing. I got it there without problems, went back to Atlantis, and a few days later returned to the SGC to take the Jumper back. Only when I emerged on the other side, it was immediately apparent that it was no Atlantis…”

*

The back of the Jumper had barely cleared the event horizon when the front end hit something solid and the entire ship jumped back an inch or two before Alice got it stabilized. It was very dark, but in the bluish light coming off the Gate, Alice could see black walls pressing down on her from every direction—and then the Gate flickered and went out, plunging her into total darkness. She engaged the floodlights, but they were so bright that she had to squint to look around.

It wasn’t a room—it was a cavern, and the walls were made of stone that looked like it had been melted into a solid black mass. The hole was just long enough for the Jumper to fit in, and as wide as the Gate—and, in fact, Alice realized it must have been created by the kawoosh, the unstable vortex extending out when the Stargate had been activated. This meant that there must have been a little space between the rocks, or otherwise the event horizon couldn’t have formed and the Gate would not be opened. The Jumper was now suspended in the middle of the cavern, pointed upwards, although of course the inertial dampeners and artificial gravity made it indiscernible inside.

How did she get here? Could it be that Harriman had misdialed the address? But that wasn’t possible. Atlantis address was programmed into the computer, Harriman wouldn’t have been choosing the symbols manually. That meant there must have been a glitch in the system—or perhaps a hack? Either way, it resulted in Alice ending up here—wherever _here_ might be. Moreover, she had no way back. The Jumper had a DHD of its own, of course, but it wasn’t configured for Milky Way Gates, and even if she somehow managed to change that, she was still stuck in a cavern only big enough to fit her Jumper. If she opened up the Gate, she’d be swallowed up by the kawoosh and instantly vaporized.

She tried the radio, but it was silent; not surprising under god knew how many tons of rock, not to mention that it was probably an uninhabited planet. A volcanic one, perhaps, judging by the fact that the Gate was buried in solid stone. Either way, she was on her own—and she couldn’t exactly wait for a rescue, either. If the SGC realized they had sent her astray, they would try to reestablish the wormhole, and that would end up in her being vaporized, as well. She had to do something—and the only course of action available to her at this time was also a very risky one. Nevertheless, she didn’t think she had any choice.

She took a deep breath and braced herself. The Jumper’s weapon port opened and a single drone shot out, burrowing into the rock above; a number of smaller and bigger debris fell onto the front window, and Alice squinted again, expecting it to break any moment—but it held up. She counted breaths while the drone pulsated like a firefly in her mind; and then suddenly she felt it burst out into the open. She willed it to go back down and widen the narrow corridor it made on its first passage; more rock fell onto the front window, but the path was now almost wide enough for the Jumper to pass. Alice commanded the drone to turn around again and then followed carefully, almost rendered blind with the windshield obscured by the debris. It took quite some time, but finally she managed to fly out of the narrow corridor made by the drone and into the open air.

She righted the Jumper, so that the gravity helped the rocks slide off the window pane. She noted with alarm that there was a little crack on the right side of it, but it was either still hermetically sealed, or the air on this planet was breathable, for she did not feel any difference. She rose up higher, killed the floodlights—for it was daylight—and started looking around.

The area immediately beneath her looked like a crater after some big explosion—or maybe a meteor hit. She remembered reading a report about a similar thing that had happened to O’Neill in the early days—the Gate had been similarly buried, but Colonel Carter was able to build a particle accelerator that broke through the initial layer of melted rock covering the event horizon; the unstable vortex then made a cavern and Teal’c went through to try and unbury the Gate. That whole thing was caused by a meteor shower—but what had happened here?

The crater was huge—at least twenty miles in diameter, maybe more. It took her a moment to notice that what lay beyond didn’t look like your typical volcanic planet, or one devastated by a rain of meteors. In fact, the horizon was all green with trees, coming up high, almost to Alice’s level. _Mountains_ , she realized, and began slowly spinning around to see if they were encircling the entire crater—and then stopped dead.

Those were not trees—nor mountains, nor deserts, nor any other natural terrain fixtures. Covered with debris and dust, and partially destroyed and crumbling, but those could only be houses. Hundreds upon hundreds—and even some higher buildings, though nothing like the skyscrapers of L.A. Alice frantically engaged the HUD and looked at the readings with disbelieving eyes.

*

“It was Colorado Springs.” The memory colored Alice’s voice with emotion. “I have seen it often enough from above to recognize the terrain. But it was impossible—I had _just_ been there half an hour before, and the crumbling buildings I saw from the Jumper looked like they had been in that state for a long time.” She paused and looked at the President. His eyes were opened wide and he listened in rapt attention, forgetting the drink in his hand. “You can imagine, sir, how confused and panicked I felt at that moment.”

“No, I don’t think I can.” He shook his head, remembered his whisky and took a sip. “I don’t think anyone can who hasn’t been in a similar situation. Which is not a big number of people, from what I understand.”

Alice nodded. “But it wasn’t the first time something like this happened to a member of Stargate Program, and although these particular reports are heavily classified so that I never personally read them, I couldn’t help but overhear some mentions of these events during my time on Atlantis. Why, I myself spoke with survivors from an alternative reality that had fled their Ori invasion straight into ours. Still, it took me quite a while to put two and two together. I guessed that somehow I had been transported into a parallel universe, though of course, for all intents and purposes, the Stargate itself shouldn’t be able to send me astray in such a way, but we’ve seen stranger things happen.”

“I bet you have.” The President nodded. “And what did you do?”

“I stayed in one place, deliberating on my options, for too long.” She could almost taste the metallic twinge of panic on her tongue again, feeling her heart picking up the pace. It was the first time she was recanting the story in such detail—at the President’s own request, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed to come in person—and she was having problems remembering it without reliving it. “All at once my Jumper was shaking, the console flashing red, and I realized I was under attack…”

*

The training kicked in and before any conscious thought came bubbling up to her brain, she was already putting the Jumper into a spin, avoiding further damage. The HUD was suddenly full of pulsating red dots, and she recognized their signatures before she could even see them through the window: Darts. _The fuck are Wraith doing here?!_ But there was no time to speculate now; she had to act.

She pulled up and turned around to look at the fleet of the small alien fighters coming onto her like a plague of locusts. There was no way in hell she was going to be able to deal with all of them—but if she could fight off the four or five at the spear of the attack, she would have time enough to cloak the Jumper and flee. If she did that without getting rid of the first few oncoming Darts, they’d be able to take her down even just by shooting blindly.

Without wasting any more time, Alice commanded the Jumper’s weapon ports to open once more and fired four drones. Never before had she tried to control so many of them at once, but there was not enough time to do it one by one now. It gave her a strange feeling, like her mind was stretching and flexing, and she concentrated hard, dividing her attention between the drones and her Jumper. While the projectiles flew towards the oncoming hostiles, she made a tight one-hundred-and-eighty degrees turn and sped away. Two of her drones found their marks immediately, and she saw two of the red dots on her HUD flicker and disappear; now, with only two more missiles in play, it became easier to control them, and she disposed of the other two Darts almost just as quickly. The Wraith fighters really had no chance against a Jumper flown by a skilled pilot—except there was still a real swarm of them on her tail, and if she didn’t escape, she’d end up exactly like the Ancients had—overwhelmed by sheer numbers. She marked a turn to the right, cloaked her Jumper, and immediately broke left. Then she dropped towards the ground like a rock, only stopping when she was literally a couple yards above the treetops, and there she hovered, unmoving, for a long while, observing the dots on her HUD zigzagging here and there, apparently trying to find her. Eventually, after what felt like at least an hour but turned out to be only ten minutes, they gave up and flew upwards, disappearing into the cloud cover.

Alice took a deep breath, relieved. Her Jumper got a few hits in the initial attack, but it seemed like nothing vital had been damaged; she was still alive, even if her situation was very precarious. This reality was clearly dangerous. She wondered what kind of chain of events could have led to this eventuality. Perhaps here the Super-Hive had not been defeated? Maybe, instead, it had destroyed the Cheyenne Mountain from the orbit—or, possibly, the SGC had initiated a self-destruct when they had been overrun by Wraith? And now the Wraith hovered somewhere above the city, making sure Earthlings didn’t try anything funky like unburying the Gate to seek help with their allies… and probably doing regular trips down to feed, too, she realized with horror. Colorado Springs was clearly empty—she hadn’t seen any movement there, and the buildings looked uninhabitable, nature already starting to reclaim its ground at the edges of the town. But what about the rest of the country? What about Los Angeles? She couldn’t know if there was an alternative version of herself in this universe but if there was… was she even alive? Was her mom? Was Jake or Aaron?

She shook her head, reminding herself that such speculation was pointless. She had sometimes thought about the alternative reality where Father Lawrence and his people had come from—wondering if there was a version of herself there, too, which had not survived the plague—but it never could lead to anything. Now, however… well, she would perhaps know in a few hours—if she began suffering from the entropic cascade failure, she’d have an irrefutable proof that there was another Alice Boyd, still alive, somewhere in this reality. And if not—it could be that her other version was dead, or never existed; or even that the two universes were so close to each other that the effect would be negligible. 

She had bigger problems to consider. She had no idea how it was possible for the Stargate itself to fling her into this parallel universe, and she had to find a way to get back. But how? The Gate was buried under a mile of melted rock. Sure, she had made a corridor that led straight to it, but it wasn’t exactly a good place to stay for any prolonged period of time, not with the Wraith hovering just above, and she doubted she could find a way to get back very quick. Not to mention that she had no idea how to reprogram the DHD in her Jumper to work with the Milky Way Gate—or if that was even possible. She had to find help, she reasoned, but where exactly was she supposed to look? Clearly, the SGC—or whatever this reality’s version of it was called—was no more, as evidenced by the crater where the Cheyenne Mountain was supposed to be. What were her other choices? Groom Lake, she supposed, or the new UN facility near the Area 51. Or, she realized, she could go straight to the people who run the Stargate Program—the Homeworld Command in the Pentagon, Washington D.C. She figured sooner or later she’d have to stand before General O’Neill—or his equivalent here—and ask for help to get back.

Without thinking much more on the subject, she mentally kicked the Jumper into gear and rose high above the city, and then above the clouds. She took a careful look around, but there was no sight of Darts or any other Wraith activity. They must have had a ship somewhere on the low Earth orbit, but she couldn’t see it from where she was. So, instead, she plotted a course and sped eastwards. The thick cloud cover spread before her until the horizon for almost all of the flight, which took less than ten minutes. Only at the very end she finally saw the clouds thinning, and eventually giving way to a magnificent view of the limitless sky touching the equally infinite-looking ocean.

Still cloaked, she slowly dropped towards the ground, seeing the bluish-green ribbon of Potomac that divided the district into three distinct parts, then recognizing the big green patch on the right as Arlington Cemetery, and eventually spotting the grey pentagonal building that was her target. The Jumper was still too high up to see much of anything except the general shape of the place, but the lower it went, the more Alice realized that there was something wrong with it… the ringed walls weren’t regular like they should be, the outline more jagged, as if interrupted… and then, finally, she realized with horror that it wasn’t a building anymore—it was the ruins of one. Huge gaping holes made it look like Swiss cheese, and there was debris everywhere, thick dark dust covering the once green center.

The Wraith had wiped the Stargate Command off the surface of the Earth; why did she think they would have spared the Pentagon? It wasn’t just a place where most important military decisions were taken—it was a symbol. In her own reality, it had gotten seriously damaged a few months before when the Lucian Alliance had attacked—the news had been discussed at length in Atlantis. But this… this was a complete destruction. The symbol of American military might—reduced to a pile of concrete and ash.

With her heart beating hard, panic rising again, she turned the Jumper around and flew away, across the river, over the Lincoln Memorial and its Reflecting Pool, towards the white spire of the Washington Monument that still pointed skyward like it always had. The sight calmed her a little, but she swerved left, over the Ellipse, to make sure that at least the White House still stood in this reality—and indeed it did. It looked intact, too, and Alice was so intent on it, flying over it in circles, that it took her a minute or two to actually notice the surrounding area and realize that something was wrong. _Very_ wrong.

Alarmed, she dropped the Jumper even lower, hovering no more than fifteen feet over the ground now and looking at the E Street, always closed to traffic but generally open to pedestrians and cyclists; the road was full of people, positively bursting at the seams, overflowing into the Ellipse on one side, and onto the President’s Park on the other. Alice looked at it with disbelieving eyes, her mouth going dry, a weird buzzing in her ear. This couldn’t be true. Surely, she had to be imagining it—didn’t she? It was simply impossible…

It was impossible for all of them to be dead.

*

“All of them?” The President repeated, his voice rising half an octave in surprise. “Dead?”

“Yes.” Alice’s eyes were trained on him, but she wasn’t seeing him. She was remembering the sight, a familiar sense of doom hanging over her, and a trickle of cold sweat running down her back under the uniform’s shirt and jacket. It had nothing to do with the temperature, though. “Just… thousands of bodies: men, women, children… all wearing cold weather clothes, their faces blue and purple, putrid, decomposing, clearly lying there for a long time…” She paused and blinked quickly, trying to get the vision out of her eyes.

The President looked revolted and fascinated at the same time. “Why? How?”

“Those were my own questions, too.” She nodded, then reached out for her glass, took a little sip, just to wet her dry lips, and put it back down. “Later I found out, but at the time I was just as confused. Physically sickened by the sight, I flew over them, along the E Street… and the line stretched over to the 15th Street and further on the Pennsylvania Avenue… Maybe it was morbid curiosity but I felt I had to find out just how far it went, so I followed it through the Avenue… the Freedom Plaza full of bodies, every single block overflowing with them, inside the dried up fountain at the US Navy Memorial Plaza, and around the Peace Monument, all the way to the Capitol Hill… thousands upon thousands of human bodies, just lying there, rotting in the high sun…” She had to stop; her voice cracked and failed her and for a moment she was unable to continue. She felt as nauseated now as she had been then.

The President didn’t push her; he seemed to be disturbed by the visual she had painted for him, trying to work through it. They lapsed into a long moment of silence. Alice was taking deep breaths, trying to stave off the panic that threatened to overwhelm her. _Name five things you see_ , she told herself, half-closing her eyes, just enough to not see the President’s disgusted face and to shield herself from the bright light of the lamps. The thick rug was dark cream color. The eagle on the seal of the president in the middle was looking right, towards the olive branches. The low oak table between the two sofas was empty, except for the two glasses, hers with water and the President’s with whisky. Her low heeled black leather pumps contrasted clearly with the muted décor. She took one more deep breath and then looked up, opening her eyes fully.

He was watching her closely. “It’s not easy to go back, is it?”

“It was pretty horrible.” She reached for her glass and took a big gulp, draining it. She put it down on the table, but the President immediately took it, stood up and went to pour her more water. She scrambled to stand up, but he waved at her.

“Don’t be ridiculous, stay seated,” he ordered and thirty seconds later he was back with her glass. She thanked him quietly and took another small sip. “Please, continue.”

She nodded. “I freaked out. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It couldn’t have been done by the Wraith. They leave an empty, dry husk behind when they feed—and if they decided to attack from space, there wouldn’t be much left to be seen, it would be another crater in the ground… This made no sense. Not that I was thinking very straight at that moment. This wasn’t _my_ reality, but a sight like that… I don’t know. It completely threw me off. I didn’t even notice before I was up in the air again, speeding north. Before I knew it, I was over Baltimore and I was dropping down. I had to know—I just had to make sure that what I’d seen in Washington wasn’t… that other places were okay.” She paused for a moment, remembering how much her heart had fluttered with apprehension as she went lower and lower, at the same time afraid to look and feeling compelled to. “And in a way—it was better. No dead bodies in sight—but also no living ones, either. The streets were empty. There were cars parked on the curbs—some just standing in the middle of the road, abandoned, too—but no people. Windows were dark, doors closed, storefronts’ glass shattered and insides pilfered. Frankly, it made me think of all the post-apo movies my brother made me watch with him.” She smiled nervously and then shook her head. “It was better than Washington, but at the same time… I mean, for a moment I was scared I was alone there. Like, totally alone—the only living human on the whole planet. But then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and I went even lower to see. It was a man—an actual living person in this abandoned world. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had been clenching my jaws. I relaxed and felt the panic bubbling just under the skin abate a little. I wasn’t completely alone!” She closed her eyes, remembering the relief washing over her at that moment. Without opening them, she continued: “I followed the man from above, unseen, for my Jumper was still cloaked. He was running through the streets as fast as he could, laden with an apparently heavy backpack, cradling something in his arms, and he kept looking over his shoulder, like he knew he was being watched. He finally reached a door in an alley and went inside, disappearing so suddenly that I almost lost him. I decided it was time for me to get down and find out what had happened. I figured, whoever he was, he at least could supply me with that information, if nothing else. So I landed the Jumper in another alley, and prepared to leave. I didn’t have any gear on me—I hadn’t been expecting to need any, after all it was supposed to be a simple hop from SGC to Atlantis. But all our Jumpers are at least partially stocked at all times, even those that are to be used for research only. I grabbed a tactical vest, a P90 and a Beretta, and finally stepped out from the Jumper…”

*

The air was warmer than she’d expected. She took a big gulp of it, still trying to squash the panic that continued to threaten to rise to the top. Without leaving herself any time to think, she darted across the road to the alleyway where the man had disappeared into and found the door that she had seen close after him. It led to a brick building of an old design, the kind that she’d only seen in the movies about the East Coast. With her right hand on the trigger of her P90, she reached out with her left to grab the handle, but then she heard a drawn-out sound from inside, like a yowl of an injured dog. She paused, listening intently, but it didn’t repeat, so she grasped the handle and turned it, fully expecting it to be locked—but, to her surprise, it gave way and the door opened silently. Raising the gun, she stepped in gingerly, squinting in the shadowy darkness—her eyes were used to the brightness outside.

A narrow corridor opened in front of her, with a pair of doors on each side, and a staircase a little further in. Walking cautiously and quietly, she started to move, pausing in front of the doors to listen, but no sound came from within; she continued on and stopped again at the foot of the stairs. Should she go up or down? The building was several stories high, but she had seen no light nor movement in any of the windows. On the other hand, it was broad daylight—why would anyone turn on the lights? Still, her gut was telling her that up wasn’t the way to go. She had learned to trust her instincts and so she now went down the stairs, carefully looking around each bend, her finger on the trigger.

She passed two landings before reaching the bottom of the staircase. It ended with a short corridor and a heavy door, which, again, gave way easily and without a sound when she pushed. The place looked old and abandoned—the paint was coming off the walls, exposing dark patches of mold, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust that flew and swirled around her legs with each step, effectively covering her tracks—or anyone’s who might have walked there before her. It was also surprising that an old metal door like this one didn’t squeak at all; someone must have oiled them recently.

What followed was another dank, narrow corridor; when she pulled the door close behind her, it became pitch black. She patted a pocket and extricated a flashlight, which she mounted on the P90, and turned it on. The stream of light brought the corridor out of the darkness and she looked around it; here, too, there were doors on each side, metal and heavy like the one she had just entered through. Most of them appeared closed, but a few were slightly ajar. She pushed one and it moved with a high-pitched screech that had her grimacing. She shone a light inside; it was a small room, empty but for a pile of garbage, made almost unrecognizable by the black dust settled over everything: some half-rotten boxes, a small tower of molding books, a rusty bike without tires. She figured these were basement storage rooms for the building’s tenants. It was doubtful she would find anything here—surely the man she’d seen couldn’t be coming here? And yet the same instinct was calling for her to move along. Half-convinced that she was just wasting her time, nevertheless she followed the corridor; it ended with another metal door. Alice pushed it and it opened—again, without a sound. Intrigued, she entered the room which, on first inspection, looked almost identical to the one she’d already seen. Coated in dust and filled with odds and ends that people normally stored out of the way—and old, moth-eaten armchair, a tall closet with a door hanging dejectedly from a single hinge, a heap of broken toys—it didn’t seem like there was anything noteworthy. And yet, why take care to oil the door so it wouldn’t make a sound if there was no purpose to it?

Alice frowned and stepped further into the room, sweeping around with the flashlight. It was hard to tell, but she thought the dust cover was lighter here than in the other room, especially around the closet. She came closer and tilted the other door—the one in working order—with the tip of her gun. The light skimmed the wooden back wall and then suddenly disappeared inside a hole. Alice raised her eyebrows and squatted down, getting even closer. It was only about three feet tall, and two feet wide, but that was enough for a person to go through. She shone her flashlight in, revealing a short passage that looked like it had been carved in the brick and concrete. Sighing, she turned off the flashlight, secured the gun to the vest so that it wouldn’t bang on the floor, and dropped on all fours to climb through.

Now blinded by the sudden dip into darkness, she felt her way through with her hands. The passage was mercifully short—she crawled only a few feet in before she touched a wall barring the way. Blinking furiously, trying to strain her vision in vain, she stroke the wall with her fingers. It wasn’t concrete—rather, it had the smoother texture of lacquered wood. She paused to unclasp the strap of her Beretta’s holster and put the safety off, just in case, and then pushed the wall. It moved easily, swinging open like a door and bathing her in a flood of low light, which nevertheless had her squinting. She scrambled out of the passage quickly and got onto her feet, hand on the pistol, looking around.

She was standing on a narrow gallery made of crisscrossing net of steel rods, secured with a similarly woven railing. It looked sturdy, industrial, and allowed her to look down into a large room below; thick concrete columns supported the high ceiling where neon lamps gave out a bit of light—though most of them were dark, and a few were flickering annoyingly. Huge stacks of wooden pallets leant against the walls, but the middle of the place had been emptied to be used for another purpose. Alice came closer to the railing, looking at the scene with wide eyes, for the moment forgetting about security and dropping her hand from the pistol to grab the steel balustrade.

Every last inch of the open space between the walls of pallets was taken. Long rows of people lay on the ground, some on thin mattresses, others on yoga mats, and some even directly on the floor; they were covered with comforters, blankets, even large towels and coats; Alice could only see well the ones closest to her, but they all looked pale and sickly, and some had bandages on their heads or arms. A couple people were walking up and down the narrow lanes between these makeshift beds, stopping here and there, but never for long. An unnatural hush hung in the air, only broken by an occasional low moan, quickly stifled—and the quiet voices of a group of people clustered in a circle to the right of the room, where a few tables and cupboards stood behind a parting made of what looked like shower curtains. Alice thought she recognized one of them as the man she had followed, but she could have been mistaken—she had only seen him from a distance and he didn’t have the backpack now.

“Who are you?” A sharp voice coming from her left pulled her out into reality. Instantly and without a single conscious thought, she had the M9 in her hand and, as she pivoted around to face the speaker, she pulled it up so that she was ready to shoot the moment her target was in sight.

The maneuver surprised the man who had spoken, and he raised his hands and took a step back reflexively, seeing the weapon. He stood only a few feet from her and she wondered how could she have missed him coming—she should have heard his footsteps. And then she realized that he must have come from around the bend of the wall, which was only a couple yards away. He was tall and lean, almost skinny—his face looked too thin for his skull, the skin stretched over bone in an unhealthy sort of way. His dark hair was bespattered with silver and his pale blue eyes were open wide as he watched her, his expression both anxious and alert.

“Please,” he said pleadingly. “We don’t have much, and what little we do, we need for the sick. We’ll share—just don’t hurt anyone…”

He didn’t seem to have any weapons on him, and with his hands still in the air, Alice didn’t see the point in acting all bravado. She dropped the gun, though didn’t holster it yet.

“I don’t want to hurt you, or anyone,” she said truthfully. “I… didn’t know there was a hospital here.”

He looked at her as if she was stupid. “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? How did you find us?”

“I saw someone go in. I followed.” She shrugged and looked right, over the railing, at the mass of people below. “I find myself in a… predicament. I had hoped he would be able to help me.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” he assured her. “What do you need help with? Food? Meds?”

She shook her head. “Just… information. Got a few questions.” That was a huge understatement, but she didn’t want to fire the big guns until there was no other way.

“Well, if that’s the case, I think it’s best if you talk to Ben. But…” He looked significantly at the pistol in her hand.

Alice sighed and then looked around once again, to make sure that there was, indeed, no threat in sight. Satisfied, she cocked the safety on and holstered the Beretta. “Take me to Ben, then.”

He led the way, peering over his shoulder nervously every few steps, as if trying to make sure that she still had her guns stowed away. He couldn’t know that she unfastened the P90 that she had previously secured to her tactical vest to crawl the narrow passage, so that it now hung more loosely, allowing her to grab it, aim and fire within seconds.

They went down a flight of steel stairs, reaching the bottom level, and skirted around the rows of people on their makeshift beds. Alice could observe them more closely now; most of them were young, she noted, and there were many children among them, lying quietly and either sleeping or looking into space with clouded eyes. All were emaciated, their pale complexion had an unhealthy yellowish tinge, and their bandages were dirty and bloody. Alice saw older, uncovered scars and bruises, missing limbs, lesions and burns. She counted seven rows that they passed, but there were more on the other side of the staircase.

They turned the corner and finally reached the parting behind which a group of people was still standing around. As they came nearer, Alice could hear their hushed voices.

“Skin and bones, I tell you,” someone was saying animatedly. “I am honestly surprised she held on so long…”

“Ah, well, don’t underestimate a mother’s strength,” a female voice replied. “She was really lucky that you were there. Half an hour later and the kid wouldn’t survive.”

“As it is, he still might die,” someone else cautioned. “He is very weak and…”

But at this moment, Alice’s guide moved the parting and stepped inside this improvised separate room. Everyone looked at him and then, when they spotted Alice coming in behind him, they collectively took a step back. She counted seven people, four women and three men, all standing around a table, laden with blankets, on which lay a very small baby, unmoving, but, Alice thought, sleeping rather than dead. She realized that it must have been the child they had just been talking about—and that meant that it was literally a newborn, only a few hours old at the most.

“Ben,” Alice’s guide said in an anxious tone. “This woman wants to speak to you.”

For a moment nobody moved, and Alice felt uncomfortable under their stares. And then she saw, out of the corner of her eye, one of the men on her right reach behind him to grab something laying on a cupboard. Before he could even bring the gun around, Alice already had her P90 up and aimed it at him.

“Don’t,” she cautioned him. “I don’t want to hurt anyone but I _will_ defend myself. Put it down.”

He hesitated, both his hands gripping the pistol, though it was pointed down.

“It’s alright, Kenny, do as she says,” another man ordered in a calm, tired voice. He was older than the rest of them, maybe fifty-something, with a bald head and thin, wrinkled face. He exuded authority and Alice instinctively knew this was Ben.

Kenny—Alice thought he was the one she had followed in from the street—obeyed immediately, putting the gun back onto the cupboard and stepping away for good measure. Alice moved that way, keeping an eye on the rest, took the pistol, removed the magazine and the round in the chamber, and pocketed both, leaving the weapon itself on the shelf.

“I’ll give it back later,” she promised and turned towards Ben. “I’m sorry. I really don’t wish any harm on any of you. I just need some answers.”

He looked surprised. “Answers?” He shook his head. “Not meds or food?”

“Just information for now.”

He raised his eyebrows, shrugged and then nodded at his people. “Take care of the baby and go back to work.” Then he addressed Alice again. “Will you walk with me? It’s not safe to talk too much or too loud in here. Spies are everywhere.”

“Okay. After you.”

He led her towards the back of the hidden room where a narrow path between the pallets lining the walls appeared. They followed it for a moment, turning a couple times, until they came to another heavy, metal door. Behind it was a smaller room with a desk and some cabinets, and Alice realized this must have been an office at one time. Ben closed the door behind them and then sat down in an old moldy wooden chair behind the desk. Alice took the only other one in the room, lowering herself onto it with care, for it looked like it was about to break under the smallest strain. Thankfully, it supported her weight just fine.

“I am Benjamin Lowes,” the man introduced himself with a shadow of a smile. “For lack of a better description, I am the leader of this outpost.”

Alice nodded. “I am Captain Alice Boyd, US Air Force.”

His eyebrows went up again. “That’s a thing I haven’t heard for a while.” He paused and then gestured at her uniform. “This don’t look military.”

She was wearing the standard Atlantis uniform, so it was no wonder that he didn’t recognize it. “I’m special ops,” she lied, not willing to go into any details on that.

“Sure you are.” He didn’t look convinced, but he waved his hand dismissively. “You said you had questions?”

“Yes, right.” Now that she had the opportunity, Alice didn’t know where to start. This man probably had no idea about parallel universes and suchlike. How was she supposed to even begin? “You don’t trust your people?” She asked the first question that came into her mind that wasn’t _what the hell is happening in this reality?_

“I trust my people with my life,” he answered simply. “I don’t trust our patients.” And, seeing confusion on her face, he elaborated: “They could be Wraith worshippers, or ravagers, or even the Lambs of God. We don’t turn anyone away who needs care. They don’t always reply with the same kindness.”

Alice nodded, although it didn’t fully make sense to her. “But, surely, if Wraith found out about this place, they would come immediately?”

“Maybe, maybe not. We’ve been here for the better part of a year, mostly untroubled. Maybe the Wraith truly can’t find us… or they like their prey to get better before they catch them to feed. We don’t follow up on those who leave us.” Her horror must have registered on her face, because he shrugged and added: “There’s nothing I would put past them.”

This, Alice had to admit, was true. The Wraith had their logic—twisted as it was, it always worked for them. “Who are the Lambs of God?” She never heard of such a congregation.

The question surprised Ben. “You don’t know about the Lambs of God?”

She sighed. “For the purpose of this conversation better assume I don’t know anything that happened in the last couple years.”

He frowned. “Lambs of God have been around for a long time,” he protested, but then shook his head in resignation. “They’re a religious splinter—a cult, really, though it grew so much that I guess it would have been called a new religion, if there were any authority left to make such decisions. They believe that aliens are God’s penance for our many transgressions and are deeply committed to purifying the Earth of sin—even if that means removing all the sinners.”

“So what, they kill people because they believe they have sinned?” It was a ludicrous idea. Surely this couldn’t be real? “Wouldn’t that make a vicious circle? You kill a sinner, so you become one yourself and must be killed off by someone else, et cetera et cetera?”

Ben threw her a weird look and Alice wondered if she didn’t offend him somehow. His deep-set eyes were glistening, but with what emotion, Alice couldn’t tell. “They don’t consider killing sinners to be a bad thing. They think of it as a just war—a righteous war.”

“That’s not war, that’s just murder,” Alice contradicted heatedly.

Ben raised his hands. “You don’t have to argue with me. These are demented people. I fear the new reality had precipitated their rise to power, but of course it’s been brewing up for some time before.”

He said _new reality_ as if it was a proper noun and Alice understood well what he meant by that. The appearance of aliens—a life-sucking kind at that—must have shaken the world to its core. She wondered briefly how much of the devastation she had seen was caused by the Wraith, and how much by people rioting on the streets...

“And all this—“ she made an all-encompassing gesture with her hand “—is it the same everywhere?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean… the devastation. Besides that one guy I followed in here—I haven’t seen a single living soul on the streets. Is it like this everywhere?”

His brow furrowed deeper as he looked at her, for the moment silent, just watching her closely, his gaze slipping from her face down to her tactical vest, then sinking lower to her boots, and then up again, back to stare into her eyes. It made her nervous and she instinctively gripped the P90 that hung from the sling attached to the vest.

“What?” She asked.

“Who are you?” His voice became suspicious now. “How come you don’t know the basic things?”

She rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t matter now. I told you—assume I know nothing.”

He shook his head. “It’s not just that, though. You introduced yourself as US Air Force—but all the military had been either wiped out or went underground with the president. You look healthy and well-fed, and I’ve never seen a person in this wretched place that wasn’t half-starved to death since the beginning of the New Reality… And your gear is in perfect order—your gun looks pristine, like it was cleaned and oiled recently. Clearly, you don’t belong here. So who are you?” And then, with a slight tremble in his voice, he added: “Are you a Wraith worshipper?”

“I am not!” Alice huffed indignantly, but then told herself to remain calm. This wasn’t her reality, after all—she shouldn’t take it so personally. “If I was, what would be the point of asking questions about those basic things, as you called them?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “And that’s what worries me.”

Alice scrutinized his thin, wrinkled face. Could she tell him the truth? He seemed to be in earnest—but then again, she was a notoriously bad judge of character. No, she couldn’t trust him—not with the whole story, at least. After all, _he_ might be a Wraith worshipper, just waiting for a scrap of information that could elevate him in the eyes of his masters… and if they knew where she came from—and that she had a Jumper… no, she could not risk that.

“You are right that I don’t belong here,” she allowed cautiously. “I am here by accident and I truly don’t know anything that’s happened since—uh, since the New Reality. I can’t tell you much more—I think you’ll understand… and the less you know, the better for you, too.”

He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. They were pale blue, almost grey, but they looked blurred, as if he was always at the edge of tears.

“Yes,” he said, his voice grave now. “It is like that everywhere, at least as far as we know. At the beginning, when there was still communication with the rest of the world—everyone was attacked. We assume they suffered the same fate as we did—most of them were captured or killed, the rest went into hiding and are being picked out one by one.”

Alice frowned. “Why do they linger? The Wraith?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” He shrugged. “More prey for them to feed on.”

“But Wraith standard tactic is to capture the majority of the population—keep them in cocoons on their Hive ships for later—but leave the remainder to rebuild and grow again. So why haven’t they left yet?”

“Keep them for later?” He seemed revolted at the idea. “That’s what they’re doing?!”

Oops. He didn’t know that part and Alice instantly regretted sharing that information. It could do nothing but haunt him. Not knowing how to soften the blow without lying, she decided to ignore it. “Why haven’t they left?”

“I… I don’t know. I… don’t think anyone ever expected them to leave, really. I thought they were going to stay until they killed every last one of us.”

“Well, that is also possible,” Alice agreed. “It’s sometimes difficult to predict their movements.” She paused for a moment, thinking back to his words a little while ago. “You said that the military went underground?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “The last I heard, yes. They tried to stop them, of course, but they were woefully unprepared for the size of the attack… eventually the president recalled all of them to regroup and strategize, and that’s all I know.”

Alice raised her eyebrows. The way he said it made it sound like a lie, even to her inexpert ear. He must have known that she saw through it, but he just pursed his lips into a thin line and looked away. She needed to press him on this—but first…

“What happened in Washington?”

He turned his gaze back to her, and his eyes were sad. He didn’t get a chance to respond, however. A harsh knock on the door interrupted them, and, without waiting for a response, a man entered the room. Alice recognized the man who had found her and brought her to Ben.

“Ben…” He said and then stopped, looking at Alice with suddenly wary eyes. “Something happened. We need you there.”

Ben got up immediately—though his movements were sluggish, as if he was in pain—and without a backward glance, left the room, with the other man on his heels. Alice hesitated for a moment and then shrugged and followed them, too.

They got back to the semi-hidden room, where even a bigger group was now gathered around what Alice realized was an old military radio—like from the seventies or eighties, a big one that could be carried in a backpack but left little place for anything else. She stayed back, hiding in the shadow of a tall stack of pallets, and listened to the conversation. She was sure that Ben knew she was there—he wouldn’t have expected her to hang back alone in that office, would he? Nevertheless, he seemed to forget or ignore her presence.

“What’s wrong?” He asked in a clipped tone as soon as he arrived at the center of the scene.

“Beta-4 was attacked by ravagers,” Kenny replied quickly. Alice noted that he had the gun that he had pulled on her in his hand. She wondered if he replaced the magazine—surely they must have had a stash of spare mags somewhere…

“Who’s closest to them?”

“Gamma-7, but they’ve been hit pretty hard by the fever, they don’t have anyone who could help.”

“How far to Beta-4?”

“They’re in Fells Point, two and a half miles from here.” Someone brought a creased and well-worn tourist map of the city and spread it on the table. “That’s half an hour on foot—more if you want to be stealthy. We could drive there, but…”

“We’ll be spotted.” Ben nodded, leaning over the map. He studied it for a moment, a deep crease forming between his eyebrows. Then he addressed Kenny: “What’s their status?”

“They’re holding them off for now, but it can’t last for long. They have more manpower but very little training—and entirely not enough bullets.”

Ben sighed deeply, his eyes still looking at the map. For a moment, everybody was silent, save for the gentle whisper of their breathing and an incidental hushed moan from the patients beyond the parting.

Alice observed them from her shadowy hiding place and led a silent battle with herself. She had the means to take them all to their destination—another hospital or other kind of human camp, she guessed—within seconds. But to do so, she would have to show them the Jumper, her one and only advantage in this hopeless situation. And could she really trust them? They didn’t look threatening—indeed, they looked miserable and abject, and Alice’s natural protective instinct was ringing loud and clear, pushing her to try and help them. But for what price? She couldn’t deny the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that lingered around.

The silence around the table stretched into a minute and then two. Finally, one of the women standing close to Ben spoke softly.

“There’s almost twenty-five people there. Most of them are children.”

“I know.” Ben sighed deeply again. “But my responsibility is to this outpost first and foremost. We’d lost too many good people already. No. We will go on foot and trust that they can hold on until we reach them. Let’s get moving. Holly, let them know we’re coming. You, Rebecca, Tasha and Jordan will stay here, the rest of us—let’s get our gear and go. I wanna move out in five minutes!” His voice changed, became harsher and even more authoritative. Evidently he was used to giving orders. Alice wondered if he hadn’t been in the military once. Not recently, perhaps—but one did not lose the tone of command even years after leaving active duty.

People started moving around him immediately, opening cupboards and handing out big, oversized hoodies, in whose large front pockets they could hide their mismatched weapons. To the pistol held by Kenny they added two more, but that was it when it came to guns—the rest had to make do with knives, machetes and other blades. At least they all looked very sharp.

Alice stepped out from the shadows and, though she felt everyone’s eyes on her instantly, nobody stopped her as she walked up to Ben. He was just putting his hoodie on and looked at her without surprise.

“I can help,” she offered quietly. For a moment, he held her gaze, and then looked away to grab a thin knife that somebody had passed him. She took a deep breath and then, before he managed to put his weapon in the pocket, she reached down to her thigh and unstrapped the holster with her Beretta. Silently, she extended her arm to him. He looked down at the gun, then up at her, then back down and, finally, gingerly picked up the pistol. It slid easily out of the holster and he examined it carefully. Then he looked back at Alice and she thought she saw cautious gratitude in his eyes. She opened one of her many pockets on the vest, took out a spare magazine, handed it to him, too, and then turned around to Kenny. He was watching her like a hawk, the gun still in his hand, but pointed down. She nodded to him and offered the magazine and single bullet that she had previously removed from his Glock. He hesitated for a moment, but then took them from her and immediately hid them in his vast front pocket.

It didn’t even take them the whole of five minutes to get ready. As soon as everybody armed themselves, Ben led them up the steel stairs, retracing Alice’s steps, to the gallery, through the hole in the wall to the next building. Before letting the entire group—there were six of them, plus Alice—out, Ben sent Kenny first to the alleyway and didn’t make another move until the younger man came back to confirm it was safe.

They flew through the empty streets silently like ghosts, in a single file, taking cover in each back alley, behind cars and inside open doors. Kenny was at the front, checking the ground ahead of them, and Alice took the rear. The further away they went from the entrance to the hidden hospital, the quicker their pace was and the lesser the precautions, and Alice understood that they weren’t so much concerned with being seen as giving enemies a clue as to where their base camp was. They all looked nervously up often, checking if the coast was clear. At some point, a distant caw of a crow sounded from somewhere above and sent all of them scurrying to hiding places; Alice dipped behind an abandoned car, too, but her hands were on the P90, trailing the muzzle at the sky, while their instincts was to cower in hiding. It wasn’t lack of courage, she knew; these men and women had been through such terror and grief that they’d been conditioned to avoid it at all cost. This wasn’t a world in war; the battle had been had, and they lost. Now what remained was to fight for survival. Not just survival of an individual—rather, that of their entire species. It wasn’t just people who were in danger. It was all of humanity.

She wondered briefly about the fate of other creatures in Milky Way—not just other humans, transplanted all over the galaxy from Earth, but the Jaffa, the Goa’uld, hell, even the Nox or the Reetou, or any number of other species. Were the Wraith able to feed on _them_ , or just humans? Did they conquer them before invading Earth? Or did they only care about this world, so rich in their prey?

Despite the precautions that slowed them down on their way, only half an hour of this stealth run through the dead city passed before they heard the first, distant gunshots. It didn’t sound like a regular shooting—there were long intervals between each discharge. When they got closer, another sound became audible—muffled shots, more akin to a buzzing than the metallic _pop_ of pistols. And then Kenny halted their progress with a raised hand and they all huddled around him, just before a corner of a five-storey red brick building. On their left, Alice could see open water and she figured they must have been on the bank of the river she had seen from above when she had flown over the city in her Jumper.

“The entrance to the outpost is just on the other side of the building,” Kenny said, barely above a whisper. “By the sound of it, they haven’t broken inside yet. Beta-4 took good precautions, they boarded up all other doors, only the front door opens and they have a line of sight on anyone who approaches. But that also means that when we move, they’ll have us within seconds. We may need to wait for backup—Beta-8 is coming this way, too.”

Ben shook his head. “We can’t wait. Beta-4 must be almost out of bullets—and they can’t stop them with only the Intars.”

Intars! So that was the odd muffled sound. For a second Alice wondered how the hell some random group of people in Baltimore, Maryland, got hold of intars, which, at least in her world, were limited to SGC, Groom Lake, and a couple other military installations in Nevada and Colorado that trained SG units—but then she dismissed the thought. It was unimportant.

“That’s not a good tactical situation, boss,” Kenny warned. “They’ll have us the moment we show our noses around the corner…”

“We can flank them,” Alice interrupted and gestured to her left. “There is a passage through the middle of this building, over there. There’s six of you, and you have four guns among you now. Depending on their position—and we’ll have to determine that first—two should go around the building on the right, one on the left and one through the underpass.” She pointed the directions as she spoke.

“You don’t make decisions here,” Kenny told her peevishly.

“No, but what she suggests makes sense.” Ben quelled the younger man’s angry protest with a single look before Kenny managed to open his mouth again. “Do go on, Captain.” He stressed her rank, as if trying to give her more authority.

Alice nodded thanks. “Those of you who have only knives should hang back for now and make sure _they_ don’t go around to flank you.”

“And you?” Ben asked calmly, putting a restraining hand on Kenny, who had made another nervous move. The situation looked so familiar that, for a moment, an intense feeling of déjà vu gave her goosepumbs, before she remembered that she had, indeed, seen something very similar, back in her own reality, years ago, when they had first arrived on New Lacrona. The name of the angry man had been Chester, not Kenny, and it had been Mother Hlava putting her hand on his shoulder to calm him down, but her face had borne the same expression of indulgent admonishment as Ben’s did at this moment.

“I’ll make a wider arch around the place and try to approach them from the back, or maybe get up on the roof of some neighboring building to take them out.” She held her P90 up. “It has up to two hundred yards of effective range so if I find a good vantage point, I can take them out one by one, like fish in a barrel, they won’t even know what hit them. Just keep them occupied till then and don’t take any risks and I’ll deal with the rest.”

For a long moment Ben was looking down at her, measuring her with his pale blue eyes. Then, at length, he nodded and smiled—for the first time since Alice had met him. “Let’s do this, then.”

They immediately broke into three groups and went to take positions. Alice couldn’t help but be impressed with their silent efficiency. They didn’t need to speak to act swiftly and in sync—and Alice knew that such level of cooperation didn’t happen overnight. The circumstances in this post-apocalyptic reality had turned a bunch of civilians into a competent team.

Alice, on her part, crossed the road at a run and then, hugging the walls of the building opposite the Beta-4’s outpost, she moved towards the sound of gunfire. Soon she came to another street that she had to cross but then, finally, hiding behind an abandoned car, she had a line of sight to the front of the building. The entrance was barricaded with what looked like a steel-reinforced door laid on its side, and there was someone hiding behind it, appearing for a second to give a shot and then dropping back down before a rain of bullets could reach them. Alice spotted another defender in a window on the first floor, and she thought there was at least one more on the side of the building further from her, but she couldn’t see there. She could see, however, the attackers: there were about a dozen of them, spread around the empty space in front of the building, which, Alice thought, must have been a park-like square at one point in time; now the once-neat lawns were overgrown with shrubs and a weaving mess of ferns, field flowers, and other greenery, the pathways had moss and grass peeking from in-between the stones, and amongst all of it lay an overturned bus, covered in dirt and already showing huge patches of rust. The attackers hid behind anything that accorded any sort of shelter: the bus, the low stone wall lining the path, and even trees. From where she stood, Alice could easily pick off four or five of them—but the rest were beyond her line of sight.

At that moment, as if on cue, new sounds of gunfire joined the cacophony: Ben and his people started shooting. Immediately, Alice saw two of the attackers fall down, but the rest quickly regrouped and returned fire.

Without wasting more time, Alice turned around to look at the building behind her. As luck would have it, it was a two-storey house of red brick with the door just a few paces from her. With the attackers currently occupied by Ben’s people, Alice risked the mad dash to the entrance, praying that it would be open—but it didn’t give way. Instead, she moved off to the right, where a window once was—now just a gaping hole without glass. Someone must have broken it to plunder the apartment, and Alice now used it to get inside.

She found herself in someone’s kitchen, but only glanced at the dishes still piling in the sink and quickly moved towards the hall and the staircase. She climbed it all the way up to the second floor and into a room whose window was overlooking the square. She stopped for just a moment to look around at the fading pale blue walls and white-painted furniture: a tall closet next to a changing table and a little crib on the other side. Then she crossed the room and looked out the window. Here, twenty feet above the street level, the glass was still untouched, so she slid it open and took a position with her P90, unclasping it from its sling for ease of use, since she had to bring it up to her eye level for precision shooting. She didn’t have an extended barrel on her, but even without it the distance to target was well within the gun’s range.

From this vantage point she could see nine out of the ten remaining attackers. A tree growing to the right of the window obscured part of her field of view, but, from what she had ascertained before, all of the ravagers were grouped around the entrance to the Beta-4 outpost, spread in a line behind the overturned bus, tree trunks and the low wall that accorded only enough shelter to lie down behind it.

She exhaled, took aim and pulled the trigger just once—and one of the attackers, closest to her, fell down, a spray of blood issuing from his head. Trying not to look or think about it, Alice moved on to the next target, and then the next, and the next. The rest of them didn’t even notice until the fourth body dropped; then they began looking around to locate where the shots were coming from. Alice fired once more, but this time they were ready and even though her target fell lifelessly to the ground, they finally saw where she was and she had to pull away from the window to avoid a rain of bullets. Remembering that the window in the next room was hidden behind a tree, Alice decided to check if there was any chance to fire from there, between the branches. That decision saved her life.

She crossed the nursery and was just reaching for the knob when the door opened with a bang, hitting her on her side so violently that her P90 flew out from her hand and clattered to the ground—she hadn’t re-attached it to the sling on her tactical vest. She almost lost her balance, too, and teetered back until she hit the rail of the crib and steadied herself. In the meantime, a man who had forced the door entered with a pistol drawn. If Alice had still been crouched at the window, he’d just need to pull the trigger to shoot her in the back; she’d already be dead. But he was already turning, his gun trailing onto her, and Alice’s P90 was somewhere on the floor.

It was like all of the moves she had practiced with Karim for so long made themselves, as if some invisible strings pulled at her joints, without a single conscious command from her brain. Both her hands flew to the pistol, grabbing it and forcing it inwards, towards her attacker; as it did, her left arm extended to deliver a punch into his jaw while the right palm, grasping the muzzle, wrenched the gun out of his hand. The jab she’d given him wasn’t particularly powerful, but it made him take a step back and that was enough. She was now gripping his pistol, but before she managed to turn it in her hand to be able to shoot, he was already jumping back towards her. He had an advantage of range and strength—he was at least ten inches taller and much bigger than her small frame. Not wanting to risk him getting the gun back from her, she threw it away and it landed on the floor and slid beneath the changing table on the other side of the room.

It was immediately clear to her that the man was not a trained fighter. He went in for her with all of his momentum and strength, trying to grab at her throat, and it was enough to remove herself from his path to have him lose his balance. He was quick, though; he turned around before she could do anything more and tried again, this time with a little more restraint. She slipped away, but he kept coming at her, until finally he managed to grab her by a bulging pocket on her tactical vest. The ensuing punch to her head made her see stars and she felt herself slumping off in his grip. He threw her on the ground, without releasing her, kneeling by her side, and punched again. Her head swimming, she struggled to get away, but he was much stronger and wouldn’t let go. His hand came down to her face again and a dim buzzing started going off in her ear. She thought muddily that she could not get through the next punch conscious and then her right hand came up to a sheath attached to her vest. She wrenched the knife out of it and, before her opponent had a chance to react, she stabbed him in the arm—that same one that was holding her down. He cried out in pain and instinctively recoiled. Alice, trying to gather her scattered wits about her, rolled onto her stomach and got up on her hands and knees, but at the same moment he attacked again, grabbing her up and going for the knife. She managed to twist around in his grip and for a moment they struggled silently, only their laborious breathing audible in the otherwise quiet room. Again, his size and strength were winning and he almost managed to turn the blade against Alice, all four of their hands clutching the handle now. Sensing an opening as he focused on this one task, Alice suddenly let go and twisted out of reach. The suddenness of her movement made him lost his balance again, and he fell forwards. The knife actually touched and slid on her arm; she felt it tear it open, but, high on adrenaline as she was, she barely even registered any pain. Dismissing it for the moment, she spun on her heel and planted a swift kick on her opponent’s back, sending him crashing into the floor. As he began scrambling up, she launched herself towards her P90 laying a few paces away, grabbed it, and then turned back around in time to see him swooping towards her. She pulled the trigger before her gun was fully pointed at him, and a burst of bullets hit him diagonally, from thigh to shoulder. For a fraction of a second she thought it wouldn’t stop him—he kept going—but then he teetered and finally fell onto his face, right in front of her, the knife still in his hand.

Breathing quickly, she didn’t move for what seemed like a long time, but couldn’t be more than half a minute. Then, finally, she crouched down and turned him on his back to look at him.

He was young, younger than her—in his early twenties, maybe. His handsome face was rimmed with a scraggly beard and unruly blond hair. He was wearing normal clothes—jeans and a jumper, somewhat dirty and not in the best condition, but completely innocuous—now quickly becoming sodden and red with blood. His eyes were pale gray. Alice reached out and closed them before removing her knife from his hand and returning it to the sheath. Then she went to search for his handgun—had to go on her knees to extricate it from beneath the furniture—and, finally, left the room without another look.

Coming down the stairs she kept telling herself that it wasn’t her reality, but it didn’t seem like her conscience was going to accept that as an excuse.

She’d just killed six men within five minutes and she would have to deal with it.


	3. Chapter 2

She had to stop; her mouth became too dry to speak again as the image of the young man’s face swam in front of her eyes. She had killed before, but somehow this seemed worse. It had been a dying world where people had just been trying to survive however they could. And it was just a kid—barely old enough to drink, if there were any alcohol left in that god-forsaken place.

She reached for her glass again to try to wet her lips. The President watched her as she took a sip of water and then replaced it on the table very carefully. He couldn’t know how hard it was to keep her hand steady.

“I don’t like killing people,” she explained in a low voice, dropping her gaze. “It’s easier with the Wraith, but people…” She shook her head.

“I would be concerned if it were any different,” the President assured her. “It’s a sad necessity. I’ve never done it myself… but I sometimes find myself in a situation where it’s done on my order. And it’s never easy.”

She looked up at him and half-smiled wanly. He wore a very compassionate expression on his face, but despite this claim, he couldn’t quite comprehend how truly awful it was when it was your bullet or your knife that bled the soul out of someone’s body… how it never ceased to haunt you, even years later. She still sometimes had flashbacks to the two Jaffa she had to kill back when she still had been a 302 pilot and had gone on her first ground mission.

She decided it was time to pick up the story. “When I came back to the street, it was empty. I didn’t think Ben and his people could have gotten the remaining four attackers, not with their handguns and limited number of bullets. They got lucky at the beginning of the fight because they took them by surprise. It was more probable that the ravagers decided to cut their losses and flee. Even so, I wasn’t going to take any risks so I approached the entrance to the outpost very carefully. It turned out there was no need for that. As soon as I was in sight, Ben stepped out of the entrance—the steel-reinforced door was nowhere to be seen now—and waved me inside. In the end, we managed to save almost everybody—five people were dead before we arrived, but since we did, no one else on our side lost their life. The people from Beta-4 were understandably grateful, and I thought even Kenny looked at me friendlier. Ben’s guys were treating the injured at the outpost, and that’s where they brought me. Like Ben’s hospital, this outpost was also literally underground, though it wasn’t as masterfully hidden nor as big. There were twenty of them, mostly children though—anything from toddlers to teens. Only six of them were bona fide adults, and only one was older than me. As they were bandaging my wound—it wasn’t that deep, just a superficial slash—I found out that there were about a dozen outposts like this one in the inner city, and more outside. They didn’t know about all of them—for security, each outpost only knew five or six others closest to them—but they figured there must have been a network like that in every bigger city. People flocked together naturally, no matter how dangerous that was. Ben’s group was different, they actually led a hospital that admitted anyone—even those they knew had been ravagers. In itself, ravagers weren’t that much different from Beta-4 or any other outpost—just a bunch of people clinging together for survival. The difference was, of course, that they were stalking the city, plundering whatever hadn’t been plundered yet, and attacking anyone who looked like they could have any resources on them—food, meds, and bullets were in high demand. It was then that I realized how valuable was my gift to Ben. He actually offered me the Beretta back, but I told him to keep it. I had my P90 on me and I knew there were more guns back in the Jumper.”

“So these ravagers attacked the outpost because they thought they would have food or meds?” The President guessed.

Alice nodded. “And they wouldn’t be wrong—I later found out that there was an underground trade going on, a real barter system, between the outposts. Most of them had some sort of specialization—hospital, childcare, supply. There were people scavenging the city for leftover resources—mostly things like clothes, blankets, pots and pans, anything that could be useful; but also meds and guns or bullets. Food generally came from outside of the city, where groups of people wandered around, hunting and gathering like native tribes in the olden days, for it was dangerous to stay anywhere for too long unless you had a really good hiding spot, especially out in the wild where it was so easy to spot an active camp. I asked if the Wraith attacked often, and they told me it was less and less now, though at the beginning the streets were covered with dried-up husks of people who ended up as Wraith fodder. This made me think of Washington again, but, once more, I didn’t get a chance to ask—Ben gave a signal to move out. The entire Beta-4 outpost was coming with us, for it was no longer safe to remain there. They had a different spot ready as a backup—everybody always had a backup, Ben told me, for such cases exactly—so they went in that direction and we made our way back to the hospital.”

“What about that other outpost which was coming to help?”

“They left a sign for them, one that meant that everything was alright and that Beta-4 has moved on. There was no other way to contact them—each outpost had a radio, but they wouldn’t take it with them on such a mission. They were old military units, with encoded signal, and they changed frequencies often just in case. From time to time a unit would get into the hands of ravagers or Lambs of God, but the Wraith seemed to ignore any radio signals.”

“It sounds like at that point the Wraith weren’t a big threat anymore,” the President remarked with an air of confused sadness. “We humans were our own worst enemy.”

Alice dropped her eyes for a moment again. “You have no idea,” she murmured so quietly that he couldn’t have heard. Then she sighed and looked back up. “The Wraith invasion disrupted all normal functions of a society, and then the panic and ensuing scarcity of resources had brother turning on brother. When I got there, it looked like it was… I don’t know, the last throes of a dying world. And still they managed to create this network of communities that worked together and helped each other to survive, despite everything that happened and against odds that seemed insurmountable.” She shook her head. “It was like a little candlelight at the end of a very dark tunnel. Not only a proof of endurance of humans as a species, but also of humanity as an idea. I’ve never seen so much compassion and kindness as in this shabby underground hospital where people mostly came to die, for lack of medicine and equipment, not to mention actual medical personnel… they only had one trained doctor. One. And he used to be an endocrinologist before the New Reality came swooping in and turned him into everything: a trauma surgeon, infectious diseases specialist, pediatrician, and even OB-gyn. He worked himself half to death and still most of his patients died. But, as long as I stayed with them, I’ve never seen him falter or stop, or give up on a single person. None of them ever did.”

She felt tears gathering in her eyes, threatening to spill over. She quickly reached for the water, looking away, trying to hide the emotion. The President stood up and went to refill his whisky glass, lingering a little too long, and she realized he noticed and was discreetly giving her a moment to pull herself together. While he had his back on her, she quickly dabbed at her eyes to remove the treacherous moisture, took one more sip of the water, and when he sat back down opposite her, she had already managed to calm herself down.

“How long did you stay with them?” He prompted delicately with an encouraging smile, and Alice thought that he was really a good guy. His politics aside—he was just a decent human being.

“Almost two weeks,” she replied, returning his smile wanly. “At first I wanted to go immediately, but I didn’t know _where_ to go. I needed help to get back home, but I didn’t even know where to start looking for it. There was no SGC, no Pentagon in this world—and I was pretty sure that if the Groom Lake wasn’t destroyed, it would be abandoned, too. I knew where the Stargate was—buried under tons of rock in Colorado, but even the tunnel I had made with the drone didn’t help if I didn’t have any way to dial out. And what good dialing out could do me if I didn’t know how I came to this world in the first place? I had no idea how to recreate the circumstances that led me there. I needed help,” she repeated and then sighed. “So I leaned on Ben to tell me what he knew of the military. He had previously mentioned that those who survived the initial invasion _went underground_ , but he claimed he didn’t know where to find them. I sensed that he wasn’t telling me everything, though, and I was right.”

*

The man’s head was heavily bandaged, but other than that he looked quite healthy compared to most other patients of Ben’s hospital. At the very least, he looked a little better-fed than most; Alice had already noticed that skinny was a new normal here. Even her slender figure was considered ample by this world’s standards. But she remembered the time after escaping from Jareth—how emaciated she had been, and how it had affected her recovery and long-term health. No wonder Ben’s patients were making so little progress in their convalescence…

He wasn’t conscious when Ben brought Alice to him and quietly explained that a neighboring outpost had found him just a couple days ago, his head bleeding profusely, skull fractured. They didn’t know what had happened, but they brought him to Ben’s hospital. Their doctor didn’t think the brain had been damaged, but the man had lost a lot of blood and slipped into a coma. He had to share an IV with a dozen or more patients, so he wasn’t getting better as fast as he could have in normal circumstances.

“He was wearing this uniform when they found him.” Ben lifted the blanket that covered the unconscious man a little to show Alice a camo pattern on his blouse. She didn’t recognize it as belonging to any branch of the military, but then again it could have been different in this reality. He did have rank insignia—a double-bar of a captain—but instead of being embroidered on the collar, it was attached to the center of the shirt; he was missing a nametag, a service branch and any occupational badges, too, which should have been velcroed or sewn-in above the breast pockets.

“It’s possible of course that he had found or stole it, but looking at him I feel like he actually might be the real deal.” Ben paused, and then added: “Wearing a military uniform here can be both a blessing and a curse. People will think twice about attacking you, even the most zealous of the Lambs of God. But a uniform also makes you a particularly promising victim—you might have guns, bullets, meds, all sorts of things.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully. “Is it normal for servicemen to go around all alone like that?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s very uncommon to even meet soldiers at all. We hear stories sometimes, though—and in those stories, they’re always on some sort of mission against the Wraith…” He smiled crookedly and it was clear from his tone that he didn’t believe those. “I don’t put much stock in those. Maybe the military still exists somewhere in some form… but more probable is that they have been wiped out like everybody else. This poor bastard is probably a deserter—and that’s why he’s still alive. But if not…” He shrugged. “Who knows, maybe he’ll point you on your way. If he ever wakes up, that is.”

“It’s not looking all that good for him, is it?” Alice said quietly, looking at the unnatural pallor of the man’s skin. He was perhaps around her age—which made sense if he was a fellow captain. He had black hair, longer than military regulations usually permitted, but Alice doubted many people had time for personal grooming under the circumstances. He had a flat face and thin eyes that clearly invoked Asian descent, though probably farther than the last generation.

“No, it’s not. What he needs right now is a transfusion, but we don’t have any equipment to check what his blood type is, so unless he wakes up on his own and tells us, we can’t do anything. And I’m starting to doubt if he’ll wake up without the transfusion.” He sighed deeply. And then added: ”What?”

Alice had just looked up at him as a thought struck her. “Well, I’m O-negative. A universal donor.”

*

“So you gave him your blood?”

“Yeah. Actually, over the two weeks I’d been there, I ended up giving my blood to more people in need. I’d have given more if I could, but the doctor forbade me, saying I was getting dangerously close to anemia. But it just… seemed criminal not to help when I could.” Alice shook her head and smiled wistfully at the President, who was wearing an impressed look. “That, even more than my contribution to the defense of Beta-4, was what really brought them around in their attitude to me. Even Kenny seemed somewhat mollified, though his instinctive dislike didn’t just evaporate. I found out later that he was an ex-con who escaped from prison after the first Wraith attack. He had trust issues, but he was fiercely loyal to Ben and the others. We kinda became buddies when we went out exploring… I wanted to do something useful while waiting for my mysterious serviceman to get better, so I tried to help out by finding useful resources, too. I could open electronically locked doors and safes that they couldn’t so Kenny took me with him to show me every such lock that they had found in the vicinity. It was funny… to see all the cash, jewels and gold being discarded without a second thought, but you should see his excited face when we found a single bottle of Vicodin…”

“That’s _all_ you found for two weeks?!”

“People usually don’t lock food or meds in safes,” she explained. “But after a few days, we hit the jackpot: Kenny took me to a former pharmacy, and although everything easily reachable had already been plundered, some of the stronger stuff was locked away in a steel cabinet with an RFID reader. It wasn’t even that sophisticated, it was quite easy to open it when one knew what they were doing—and I did. We went back with two backpacks full of life-saving medicines that day. It was a good day.”

She stopped for a moment, remembering the expression of triumph on Kenny’s face as they unloaded their haul on the table in the _common room_ , the one divided from the main floor of the hospital by a makeshift partition. The delighted gasps of the people around, the look of grateful relief in the doctor’s eyes, the sad smile on Ben’s lips… good job, kids, it seemed to say. Good job, but it’s still not enough. Nothing’s ever going to be enough.

“Not all of it stayed with the hospital,” she continued after a moment. “They’d distributed some of it to the neighboring outposts, exchanging it for food and some other needed items. After that day, we visited more pharmacies, but most were thoroughly plundered, with more traditional locks unceremoniously broken or wrenched from the cabinets. But we repeated our success one more time, and later Ben told me that I gave them more meds in two weeks than they had gathered in the previous year. It felt good to be of service. I mean… I still wanted to get the hell outta there and go home, more than anything… but it was hard not to feel affected. Seeing all this devastation, death, misery… even if it wasn’t my reality, it was someone’s and as long as I was there, I felt beholden to help. Even felt a little guilty—here I was, coming from a place that had weathered all the threats, the Goa’uld, the Replicators, the Ori, the Wraith… well, we had our own ongoing war with the Wraith, but they _hadn’t_ reached Earth—our Earth was safe and sound. Survivor’s guilt, on a planetary scale.” She smiled, momentarily amused by the thought, and then grew somber again. “It appeased my conscience a little when I knew I was doing something to help. In the meantime, my mysterious soldier was getting better every day. He woke up from coma a few days after the transfusion and if he hadn’t been so weak, he’d have left then and there. He didn’t want to give his name to Ben or the doctor, and in fact didn’t want to talk to anyone at all. Wouldn’t say where he came from, or where he wanted to go… it took me a long time to coax him to actually have a conversation with me. I think in the end he did that only because I, too, was in a uniform.”

*

“What kind of wacky uniform is that, anyway?” He asked defensively when she pointed out that she was in the service, too.

“A miscellaneous one.” She shrugged and came down to sit on her knees by him. “But I assure you that I am an Air Force captain. My name is Alice Boyd.”

“Hrmph,” was all he replied, averting his eyes. He was sitting cross-legged on his pallet, even though the doctor had told him to lie down.

She sighed and decided to give him a little bit of truth about herself—maybe that will convince him that she’s one of the good guys. “I used to fly fighters. F-302s.”

That caught his attention. He turned to her with a frown and threw her a measuring look. “You a bit young for that, aren’t ya?”

Alice rolled her eyes. Some things, apparently, didn’t change, no matter the reality. She didn’t raise to the bait, though. “So are you gonna tell me your name? Doesn’t have to be the real one, I just want to know what to call you.”

He pursed his lips into a thin line and for a moment continued to watch her with clear antipathy in his eyes, but then he huffed and replied: “You can call me Tom. Captain Tom Sato, United States Army.”

“Finally, some progress!” She quipped, smirking, and then bowed her head in a sarcastic gesture. “Lovely to meet ya.”

This time it was him rolling his eyes, but he didn’t say anything.

“So what happened to you, Tom?” She prompted after a moment of silence, but received no answer but another annoyed look. “Okay, then let me tell you what I _think_ happened to you. You were on the run from someone—maybe it was the Wraith, maybe a band of ravagers or these Lambs of God everybody keeps telling me about. You had a fight and ended up hitting your head. You were lucky, whoever you were fighting with was spooked when a group of people from the other outpost came by. They brought you here, to this hospital, and saved your life. Am I close?”

He shrugged, but then said gruffly: “The doctor told me you gave me your blood, and that’s what saved me.” He paused for a bit and then added grudgingly: “Thank you.”

“Gee, don’t fall over yourself like that, it’s embarrassing,” Alice laughed, but rather cordially. “You’re welcome. It wasn’t completely altruistic, though. I need you.”

“And yet you’ve given your blood to other people here, even those you have no interest in,” he remarked with a little more pleasant expression.

She shrugged it off. “They need it and I have enough to spare.” She propped herself on her hand and moved to extricate her legs from beneath her, changing position, for it was becoming uncomfortable. “The one thing I don’t know, however—“ She continued as if there had been no interruption “—is what were you doing in the city in the first place. Why were you on the run?” When he kept quiet, she pressed: “I can only see one reason why a guy would be here of all places, in a uniform, but all alone. You decided to save your own neck, didn’t you? You’re a deserter.”

“I am not!” The instant indignant protest had him straightening up and looking crossly at her. “I am loyal to our country, to our president! Which is more than I can say about you!”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“You _dare_ to accuse me of desertion, but you’re here, all alone, too! What’s more, you don’t even know where the president and the rest of the military are! What else can that mean than that you defected at the very first sign of trouble?! And you! A 302 pilot who must have known about everything, about the Wraith, before any of us even had a clue! That’s more than desertion, that’s treason!” At the end of the rant he was almost shouting. A little blue vein appeared on the side of his neck and his face grew red in anger.

“You’re mistaken,” Alice replied calmly. Her composure seemed to provoke him even more, but she didn’t let him speak for the moment. “I would never turn my back on my country, on my world. I assure you that my situation is quite unique. But I need to get to the closest military command post. That is my mission.” As she said the words, an idea struck her and she looked at him searchingly. “That’s it, isn’t it? If you’re not a deserter, by your own words… if you’re still loyal, and yet you find yourself here of all places—you’re on a mission, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer, but from the way he puckered his lips again Alice inferred that she was right.

“What’s your mission?” She pressed emphatically, but he seemed to regress into his earlier uncommunicative mode. “Come on!”

“I ain’t talking to fucking traitors!” He snarled and then suddenly straightened his legs and lied down, covering himself with a blanket and turning away from her.

*

“No amount of pleading could bring him back from that sulky silence.” Alice shook her head, remembering the sheer frustration of being so close and yet being unable to get the information she needed. “I asked and begged and even threatened—he simply ignored me. I think he knew I wouldn’t actually do anything to him.” She shrugged. “I’m a wimp.”

The President smiled at that. “What changed his mind in the end?”

“Nothing, he remained obstinately silent until one morning I woke up, went to check up on him and found him gone.” She spread her arms in a helpless gesture.

“They just let him walk out?” The commander-in-chief looked surprised.

“Yeah, why not? He wasn’t a prisoner, but a patient, remember, and nobody except Ben knew why I was so desperate for information from him anyway. The night guard told me he left around midnight, meaning that when I learned he was gone, he already had six hours head start on me. So I gathered my gear and said goodbye to Ben and his people.”

“I bet they were sorry to see you go.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully. “I had been an asset, but they were used to people leaving them to go their own way. Only the most committed stayed on in the hospital.” She paused for a moment, remembering the glint of genuine regret in Ben’s eyes as she was telling him she was leaving. “I didn’t know, of course, where Tom had gone, but Jumpers have life signs sensors. They can’t cover too big of an area, but I figured he couldn’t have gotten more than fifteen miles, probably less because he was still weak from his injury. That’s nothing for a Jumper, though of course I had to look in every direction, and with every passing moment he was getting farther away. And the sensors can’t show you who is it, only that there’s a life sign, so I had to land and check each one on foot. Still, there weren’t that many solitary signs, most people went in groups. Now I could see how many people there were, really—and frankly, I was surprised at the number. From outside, it looked completely empty. There were about a hundred people in Ben’s hospital, all told, but during my search for Tom I’ve seen at least another four hundred or so, mostly in smaller groups. Still, can you imagine? Three million people live in Baltimore’s metro area—reduced to five hundred…”

She sighed and for a moment they were both silent, grappling with the concept of a loss of life of that magnitude.

Alice cleared her throat. “It took me five hours of methodical grid search before I finally found him in a patch of wooded area east of the Baltimore airport. I noticed the lone life sign, but of course I couldn’t know if it was him, so I landed the Jumper and went to check on foot. I managed to confirm that it was him and not betray myself to him—for I decided to tail him for a while to see where he was going. And I have to admit, I was impressed. With his head still covered in bandages, he kept good pace, even though he was focusing on stealth as much as speed. If I wondered why he hadn’t just picked up one of the hundreds of abandoned cars, I understood it now—that would have marked him as a target for sure. Although since that first moment when I had been attacked by Darts, I was still to see a single Wraith anywhere.”

“Did you follow him on foot, too?”

“Not at first. I kept above him in my Jumper. It was incredibly boring—from the point of view of a Jumper, he was moving like a slug. But it kept me safe and saved me a lot of physical exertion, so I wasn’t going to give that up. And then, at once, I lost all of the sensors. I couldn’t see Tom’s life sign anymore—or any other life signs, or in fact any readings at all. I panicked and instinctively pulled away—and suddenly I had HUD readouts again. I went forward again and lost it all—and I understood that it wasn’t my Jumper. There was something—some sort of electromagnetic radiation, probably—that disrupted the Jumper’s sensors. And so I was forced to land once more and follow Tom on foot.”

“You just left the Jumper behind?”

“I had little choice in the matter. I couldn’t follow Tom from above without sensors, and I couldn’t just let it go—he was my only hope of finding help. I left the cloaked Jumper in a little clearing in the woods, under the canopy of trees, in a place that was out of the way, but which I could easily find on my own. Then I went after Tom and kept up with him from afar the entire time.”

“How did you manage to follow him without him finding out?”

“With great difficulty,” she admitted with a shy smile. “I’m not that good at the whole survival in the wild thing, or with tracking game _or_ people, but three years in an Atlantis exploration team taught me a few things in that regard. I had a great teacher…” She paused for a moment, the sudden rush of emotion threatening to overwhelm her; but then she cleared her throat again and continued: “I was also aided by some tech. Jumper’s sensors were blinded by whatever radiation that was, but I had a portable life signs detector and it still worked—it only gave me a range of a hundred meters, so there were many times, especially in an open terrain, when I couldn’t rely on it, but it helped me to find Tom again pretty quickly whenever I lost him. I also had an optical scope for my P90, which came in handy a few times, too.” She picked up her glass again and took a sip. Her mouth kept going dry—she wasn’t sure if it was from talking so much, or just the sheer intensity of the emotions as she was going back the memory lane. “We walked for many hours without a moment of rest, until dusk. That’s when he finally stopped and hid in a room in an abandoned building for the night. By then I was pretty sure I knew where he was going, though not why. We were almost at the edge of Washington. The streets were empty, and I don’t know if I was imagining it or not, but I swear even from there I could smell the stench of rotten flesh…”

The President’s face contorted in an expression of disgust, but he didn’t say anything.

“I don’t think I slept at all that night. I kept checking my life signs detector to see if Tom was still there, and tossing and turning on the floor in the meantime, in the next building to his. I was up and ready to go before he even moved the next morning—and it wasn’t even dawn yet. We continued our trek into the city, and the deeper we went, the more terrified I was… now I was sure I could smell it, but thankfully Tom went north of downtown, and the closest we got was Dupont Circle… which was close enough. That was where I saw the first bodies—just a few of them, nothing like what I had seen on Pennsylvania Avenue from above, but it was enough…” She hesitated, looked at the President’s revolted face, and then decided to spare him the details. “Tom must have known about this… thing, because he made his way to Georgetown and crossed the Potomac via the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge. It would’ve been much quicker to go through the Theodore Roosevelt or Arlington Memorial Bridge, but then we’d be wading through bodies… Instead, we went south, through Rosslyn and along the riverbank, with the Arlington Cemetery on our right… I was glad we couldn’t really see anything on the other bank, but the breeze wafting in from over the water was enough to make me sick to my stomach all along the way…”

She had to stop again. The memory was so strong, she actually felt nauseous, and her palms were sweating now, too. She temporized with the glass of water, making deliberately slow movements. _Focus on the story_ , she told herself. _Not on the details. Just get on with it._

“By then I had a suspicion on what might have been Tom’s target, though I had no idea what he wanted to do in the ruins of the Pentagon. And yet that’s where he was headed and I watched him disappear inside…”

*

She was watching him through the scope of her P90 from an overpass north of the building. He picked his way through the rubble gingerly and eventually she lost him from sight. Why was he going there? The question bounced all over her head as she continued to look, unwilling to risk following him. Whatever he wanted to do in there, she figured he’d have to come out at some point. She could simply wait for him outside—although he might find another way out, she realized, and in such case she’d do well to find another vantage point to observe from, or at least come closer to track him on the life signs detector. Having decided that, she left her perch on the overpass, walked a bit forward to where it became just a raised road, slid down the little slope and, using her uniform jacket to protect herself from the spikes, she vaulted the fence into Pentagon’s territory. She took the stairs to get onto the green platform that housed the helipad, and from there took another long look. It was still three hundred yards to the building’s outer ring, but her scope was powerful enough to allow her to see every detail—the debris spilling out from the rubble into the parking lot, not just fragments of building but twisted pipes, charred remains of steel cabinets, other unidentified pieces, everything coated in a heavy layer of ash or dust. But taking a closer look at the remains of the once beautiful building she realized it wasn’t totally destroyed. There were huge craters where something sent it crumbling to the ground, but in between those the structure seemed almost intact. It was as if a series of explosions had reaped holes in the construction—or, maybe, as if something had impacted it with great force… it reminded her of the photos she had seen—photos of the Pentagon after it had been struck by the hijacked plane on 9/11. And then something caught her eye—a contorted piece of black metal that was hard to identify but looked almost as if it belonged to…

“Darts!” She whispered to herself. So that’s how the Pentagon was destroyed. It was a known Wraith tactic—sending a number of Darts on a suicide mission to crash into a building… that was how they destroyed the original Earth’s Control Chair. While Earth’s battlecruisers were occupied with the bigger threats—Hive ships and destroyers—the fast and maneuverable Wraith fighters punched a hole in their defenses and rained carnage on the American military headquarters. How many people had been caught inside? She shook her head. The motion shifted the scope—and allowed her to catch a glimpse of movement on the other side of the building. She quickly directed the lens that way.

About a dozen men were approaching the entry point where Alice had seen Tom disappear. They were armed with rifles and pistols, and that, Alice knew, spelled trouble in this world. The good guys rarely could get ahold of that many weapons. She realized they must have seen Tom enter the ruins of the Pentagon and went after him. And that meant he was in danger.

Firing expletives in her head, Alice switched the selector to “A”, taking aim… and then let the gun drop. Three hundred yards was just a little more than the effective range of the P90, she knew she could still hit her target—but not twelve at once, and as soon as they saw their first comrade fall, they’d scatter, take shelter—which there was ample of in the vicinity—and take aim at _her_. And at least two of them had assault rifles—much more powerful than her trusted P90, with better scopes and longer range. Shooting right now would be a suicide. So, instead, Alice waited for them to disappear inside the Pentagon to avoid any risk of being detected, and only then started at a run in that direction herself, her heavy backpack impeding her progress slightly.

She had to slow down as she approached the rubble. It wasn’t even that difficult—all she had to do was literally follow the men’s footsteps, as they left imprints in the heavy dust that coated the entire area. With her P90 ready to fire in one hand and the Jumper’s life signs detector in the other, she entered the dark pit that was the ground level corridor; the structure must have been tougher in that place, for it stood cut cleanly in half, while the wreckage on the right side was all squashed and bent to the ground. Still, as the light dwindled behind her when she walked further inside, the eerie silence reverberating in her ears as if it was sound, she felt as if she was entering a tomb. Her heart was beating very fast and hard and her breathing quickened with every step. Soon enough the only light was coming from the detector in her hand, but she was unwilling to turn on a flashlight—it would betray her presence. She could see the men on the little screen, and so she noticed when they divided into two groups, one heading along the outer ring, the other turning towards the passage to the first inner ring. Not knowing where Tom had gone—he was out of range of the detector by now—Alice followed the group that continued straight along. Keeping an eye on them on the screen, she soon saw them slow down and then stop. She used that time to get closer, but then noted with alarm that they were coming back. Not wanting to get caught, she hid inside one of the rooms off the corridor; it still had a door, and rays of sunshine were coming in through the glassless windows, but the inside looked like much of what she’d seen so far: empty and covered in dirt and soot, the charred remains of a desk and a cabinet a clear proof that there had been a fire that devoured the entire building… but it must have been put out at some point, or otherwise the structure would have given way and collapsed.

But the men didn’t go all the way back; instead, they found their way to the inner ring to avoid whatever obstacle they had encountered earlier. Alice realized it must have been another crash site; and indeed, as she crept up after them, she saw through another glassless window a collapsed section bigger even than that they had all used as their entry point. Wondering how many people were working in the building that day—how many had lost their lives in there—she felt a chill crawl up her spine, but pushed forward. The group she was following split up again, three men going right, and three moving left, back towards the E ring. Alice decided to go after the first. Six were a problem, but three she could deal with easily, with the element of surprise giving her an advantage.

She picked up the pace now and soon caught up with the group. They were almost halfway through a corridor when she arrived at a convenient corner, made sure her scope was set to night vision, and knelt down on one knee before leaning out of hiding. She got the first target in her crosshairs, exhaled, and pulled the trigger lightly. The gun expelled only one bullet, and the man never had a chance: he was walking away, with his back to Alice, and so he had no idea he was even in danger when the back of his skull exploded with the force of the impact. His two companions jumped up, startled, and started turning around, but Alice was already pulling the trigger for the second time, and the other guy dropped, too, his jaw turned into bloody mush. The last man was only raising his gun—he had an M16, Alice noted distractedly—when her bullet hit him right between the eyes. He dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes, with a dull _thud_ , his rifle clattering uselessly.

Alice stayed motionless for a moment, a high-pitched buzzing in her ear. Then she slowly got up and walked towards her three victims—people she had just calmly murdered without a warning. At least the ravagers she had killed earlier had been actively attacking an innocent community—but these guys haven’t done anything wrong yet. Being armed was not a crime. She only _thought_ they were going after Tom, that he was in danger. There was still a real possibility that they simply got curious about what he wanted in here, and would not cause any trouble. But Tom was her only lifeline—the only way she knew of to get some help, to get back home. And so she couldn’t afford to see how things panned out. She had to eliminate the threat.

Fighting back nausea, she picked up the M16 and then searched the body of its previous owner to discover two spare magazines in his pockets, trying to stay out of the pool of blood rapidly expanding on the ground. She took the mags, hung the rifle on her shoulder, and turned to go back the way she came. Only after she bounded the corner she let herself take a deep breath and looked back at the life signs detector.

She could still see the other group of three moving slowly along the second inner ring, almost at the edge of the detector’s range. She headed that way, but she had to turn back and find another route after being blocked with another crash site. Walking through the mostly black empty corridors made her skin crawl unpleasantly so she moved quickly and didn’t look around much. The overall silence was full of strange phantom sounds—dripping of water in one place, the creaking of the heavy steel construction in others, the eerie sigh of wind blowing through the windows and whistling between the cracks in doors and walls.

Disposing of the next group of three was as easy as that first one: they never saw it coming. Trying hard not to think about what she was doing, Alice picked up one more spare magazine—a 9mm for her spare Beretta M9—and moved on. She had lost the other group from view on the detector, so she was reduced to walking blindly around the building. She chose the middle ring, so she could cover the most ground possible, and eventually a dot appeared on the screen. It was solitary and didn’t seem to be moving much. Did the other group split up further? Or was this Tom? The dot was accompanied by a small red triangle pointing down, which meant that the person was below her level—and that meant underground.

It took her quite a while to find a staircase that wasn’t completely caved in, and she had to lose the solitary dot from view to get there. She walked towards its last location hoping it would have stayed in the same place—and indeed it did. Except it was not alone anymore—four other dots were close-by and converging on it quickly from two different directions. If it was Tom, he was about to get swarmed—and she knew he wasn’t armed.

Cursing again in her head, Alice started off at a run. The basement was even darker than the ground level floor where a bit of light penetrated through open (or nonexistent due to fire) doors at intervals; here, not even a single ray of sunshine could enter. Without much time to grope blindly around or use the scope’s night vision, Alice simply turned on the flashlight mounted on her P90 and ran on. She quickly reached a broken door—which must have been quite a feat to pull out, since it was steel-reinforced—and stopped just outside. She killed the torch, but there was some light coming from inside—orange and flickering, so probably a small fire. She could also smell smoke in the air, and there were raised voices echoing in the emptiness of the basement.

She leaned in slightly, just enough to take a quick look at the situation. The room was large, she couldn’t quite see the other side, for it was almost completely filled with rows of tall metal filing cabinets. The light was visible upon the ceiling on the left side of the place—Alice assumed it was some kind of an archive—and one of the voices also seemed to be coming from there. She thought she recognized it as Tom’s.

“Just leave me alone, I don’t have anything!” He called, but his words were met with mocking laughter.

“Excuse us for not believing you!” Someone replied from the right side of the room.

Alice looked at her life signs detector and located the two dots in that area. The other two were further in, opposite her.

“Nobody goes here anymore!” The voice continued, ridicule and menace interlaced in its tone. “It’s been stripped bare for years! So I wanna know, what are you looking for here, huh, pretty boy?”

He was getting nearer to Tom, the other two approaching too. Alice took a deep breath and slipped into the room, her footfalls barely audible. Karim would’ve been proud of her, she thought distractedly, slinking between two rows of cabinets towards where her trajectory would cross the hostile pair’s.

“That is none of your business, my friend. Just go your own way!” Tom replied loudly, but Alice thought she heard a rustling from his direction—she didn’t have the time to wonder at it, though, as she just reached the intersection. The two men were coming in from her right; hiding in the shadowy gallery created by the cabinets, she allowed them to pass her, and then stepped around the corner and put a bullet in each of their heads before they managed to make another sound.

But the echo of her shots reverberated through the stale, dank air of the basement; for a moment, the silence that followed seemed to ring in her ears like the loudest of sirens. Then another voice spoke, somewhere ahead of her.

“Jerry? You got him?”

Alice stepped over the pool of blood to move in Tom’s direction. “Jerry and his friend here are gone,” she answered in a clear, impassive voice. “And so are six more of your colleagues up there. Leave now if you don’t want to join them.”

Instantly, an enraged, unintelligible cry rose up from where the other two stood, and then Alice heard the distinct sound of heavy footfalls, quickly getting nearer.

“Shit!” She breathed and scurried towards Tom’s location. A swift look at the life signs detector told her that the two hostiles were coming in the same direction—their paths would meet there. Fortunately, Alice got there first.

It was almost the end of the room. The last row of cabinets was missing, and instead an old-fashioned wooden desk stood in the middle. There was also a door—a heavy steel one, with no visible handle or lock—in the wall behind it. The fire was burning in what looked like a metal wastebasket.

When Alice emerged from behind one of the cabinets, Tom was already waiting, lurking around the corner. He jumped up at her with something long and heavy in his hands, and it started coming down on her, but she managed to twist out of its range. She saw that it was a broken chair leg.

“You!” He hissed, but didn’t raise his makeshift weapon.

“Not a good time,” she replied, rolling her eyes and pulling the M16 from her shoulder. She tossed it to Tom and he caught it deftly, though the surprised expression on his face was quite amusing. Alice turned around, not willing to lose any more time, and took position on one side of the row of cabinets, where the two incoming hostiles would emerge. Tom continued to stare at her suspiciously, but his hands run over the gun automatically, checking its condition, making sure the magazine was properly inserted and the safety selector is set on auto. Alice threw him an exasperated look and, perhaps moved to action more by the sound of footsteps closing in than her silent insistence, he scooted over to the other side of the opening and raised the rifle.

The men were upset but not stupid; they slowed down before reaching Alice and Tom’s location, and actually split up. They couldn’t know that Alice saw their maneuver on the life signs detector. She gestured to Tom that she was going to check the other side and quietly slipped alongside the row of cabinets towards the second opening.

The guy closer to Tom started shooting first—he only had a pistol, Alice ascertained from the sound, and he was firing randomly to grab their attention. His companion, in the meantime, flanked them and swung around the corner, a shotgun in his hands, ready to fire at them from behind—but Alice was waiting for him and fired first. Then _she_ swung around the corner and got the other one in her crosshairs, but before she could pull the trigger, Tom’s bullet struck him in the head and he dropped to the ground.

Alice went back around the cabinet, checking on the life signs detector to make sure they were truly alone. Her P90 was pointed down when she stopped in her tracks, the barrel of Tom’s M16 suddenly inches from her face.

“What are you doing here?” He demanded aggressively. “Why are you following me?!”

Alice sighed and rolled her eyes, but her heart rate—already very high from the adrenaline—shot up again. “Gee, Alice, thanks for saving my life again!” She said in a mocking tone.

He continued to look at her, his weapon still up, his breathing heavy. Alice decided to give him a moment—and, indeed, after a minute of intense staring, he slowly lowered his gun.

“Why are you following me?” He repeated in a more restrained voice.

“I figured, if you’re on some mission, sooner or later you would end up rejoining your unit, and I could find what I’m looking for.” She shrugged and walked over to the desk in the middle of the empty space. The fire in the wastebasket was dying, the red embers giving off a lot of warmth but little light now.

“Why do you care so much about finding the Army?” There was a hint of suspicion in his question, but he stepped closer to one of the cabinets, slid out a drawer and grabbed a handful of papers inside. He threw them into the basket carefully, making sure they caught fire. The flames went up, devouring the paper quickly and basking the room in orange glow.

“I wanna go home,” she replied quietly and then added more loudly: “It’s not the Army I need, it’s the Air Force. _Someone_ must know something about why I am here.” She flicked on the flashlight on her P90 and threw him an amused smile, raising it up to show it to him.

He frowned. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”

Alice ignored that. “Why did you come here, though?” She asked, moving the torch around to look at the cabinets, the desk and the door in the wall. “What’s so important here?”

“Yeah, like I’m gonna tell you,” he puffed. “I don’t know you. You won’t even tell me your name!”

She pivoted around to face him, her eyebrows arched high. “What do you mean? I told you my name.”

“Alice Boyd?” He sneered. “Like that’s your real name!”

“Why would you think it’s not?” Her genuine surprise must have registered on her face because his frown deepened.

“Your name is really Alice Boyd?” He shook his head and then shrugged. “I guess it’s possible that’s a coincidence…”

She threw her hands in the air in a helpless gesture. “Why would I lie about it? And who do you think my name is a coincidence with?” The question wasn’t particularly correct grammatically, but he understood.

“You _are_ crazy,” he mumbled as if this confirmed all of his fears, but didn’t elaborate. Alice found all of his veiled allusions with no explanation frustrating, but it wasn’t a good time to keep interrogating him.

“Whatever. Listen, this smoke is going to choke us sooner or later, there’s no ventilation here in case you didn’t notice—and there are still two guys out there looking for you, so maybe grab whatever it was that you came here for and let’s clear out, shall we?”

He didn’t seem ready to move on, though. “How did you find me here? This place is huge, yet you managed to appear in the nick of time.” His voice was snappish and suspicious.

Alice raised her left hand. “Life signs detector,” she replied curtly, but extended her arm for him to see. He looked at it and then reached out to take it from her, but the moment he did, the screen flickered and went out. “It only works for people with a special gene.”

“Where did you get that?” He asked belligerently, keeping the device to look it over.

“It’s a long story.” She sighed and, with her arm stretched towards him, she twirled her fingers in a _give it back_ gesture. He hesitated but then deposited it on her palm. The screen flickered back to life the moment it touched her skin. “Again, not a good time. Let’s get somewhere safe and then there’s gonna be time to discuss life stories.”

“I’m not leaving here empty-handed,” he protested and his eyes flicked to the door in the wall.

Alice turned towards it to take a closer look. “So, whatever you need is in there,” she guessed. “Can we just take it and leave, then?”

He didn’t reply right away so she looked around her shoulder at him. His face bore an odd expression—she couldn’t read it at all. “What?”

“I don’t know how to open the door,” he admitted sulkily after another moment’s hesitation. “I was supposed to come here with… someone who used to work here, but I had to leave him behind.”

“You left someone behind?” Alice pivoted around to face him fully.

“He was injured, I left him in one of the civilian outposts on the way,” he explained reluctantly.

“So you knew you had no way to open this door, and yet you came all the way here?”

He frowned and exhaled heavily, and Alice realized he was trying to restrain anger. Whatever did she do to provoke such hostility in him? She didn’t know.

“I had no choice. I had to try,” he finally sputtered, his voice low and sullen. “I thought I might find a way to force it open, somehow…”

Alice turned back to look at the door. It looked heavy—concrete reinforced with steel, she thought, like vault doors in banks—or Cheyenne Mountain’s own blast doors, though she doubted this one was just as thick. It didn’t have a handle or lock, but there was a metal box to the right of it, hiding, when Alice pulled up the outer cover, an electronic panel beneath.

“It’s still working,” she marveled aloud, when it lit up at her touch.

“Yeah, it’s connected directly to the emergency generator, and there’s still a little bit juice in there.” Tom walked up closer, standing just behind her, nearly breathing down her neck. She found it annoying, but decided not to say anything—as long as he was being forthcoming, she might as well use it. “But it’s got a retinal scanner _and_ a combination lock. I know the combination, but without the guy who used to work here and had access, I can’t get in…”

“Well, let’s see if I can,” she murmured and then stepped to the side, twisting away from Tom’s towering frame. She removed her backpack and started rummaging in it.

“What are you doing?” He asked, but there was now curiosity in his voice rather than anger.

Alice pulled out a service kit and her trusted tablet with the multimeter pointer. “I’m gonna try to hack the door,” she answered simply, and then, seeing doubt on his face, she shrugged. “Won’t be the first time, probably not the last either.” And, after unscrewing the panel to expose the wires and the internal circuit board, she got to work with her multimeter pointer. “Every electronic lock is basically a small computer,” she explained distractedly after a few moments of focused silence. “And a computer can be hacked, you just have to know what you’re doing.”

“And you obviously do,” Tom added, watching as she finished pointing and prodding different circuits on the board and attached her tablet to it. She didn’t reply, too absorbed in what she was doing to pay him any attention. He left her alone and she didn’t realize that he actually _left_ until she finished a minute or two later; the door hissed and slid open with a shrill screech. She looked around for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. She gathered her tools and threw them into the backpack which she put onto her back right away, and was about to call him when he reappeared in the opening between the rows of cabinets, carrying an additional gun—a pistol—and a few magazines. His boots were leaving bloody imprints, and Alice guessed he went back to search their erstwhile attackers.

“You opened it!” He exclaimed with sudden excitement and tossed his haul onto the desk. Alice followed him inside the vault.

It was rather small, she saw, moving her flashlight around. The walls were entirely covered in little square doors with locks, like safety deposit boxes in a bank—except these were larger and instead of keys, they required a combination to be entered to open.

“Which box do you need?” Alice asked, seeing numbers plastered to the doors.

“L93,” Tom replied and they both started looking, though Tom’s progress was impeded by the darkness—Alice had her flashlight, and there was still a little flicker from the fire outside, but it wasn’t enough to see much outside of the direct beam of Alice’s torch. It was little wonder that she found the number first. She showed it to him and Tom immediately jumped closer and entered the code. There was a little _click!_ and the door swung open. Tom reached in and brought out a few long rolls of paper and large binders which he carefully carried to the desk outside. Alice went back after him and picked up one of the binders. Tom threw her a warning look, but she ignored it and opened the folder.

The first page was just a white sheet of paper with red letters _Codeword classified_ in the middle and a smaller black inscription beneath: _Prodigy._ She flicked on to the second page, which was equally empty, with only a title in the center: _Creation of subspace-time crystals for zero-point energy generation_. Alice gasped and turned to the next page, but before she could read much more than the word _Abstract_ , the binder snapped close right in front of her—and then Tom wrenched it away from her grasp.

“Hey, I was reading that!” She exclaimed indignantly, only realizing how absurd that sounded in these circumstances after the words had left her mouth.

“It’s all _classified_ , goddammit!” Tom hissed, backing away with the precious folder in his arms. “It’s not for you!”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, and _you_ surely will be able to understand it! Do you even know what zero-point energy is?”

“No, and I don’t care!” He snarled, anger bubbling up in his voice again. “I just need to bring them to people who do!”

“Oh, so that’s your mission!” She said quite calmly. “Well, you’re in luck—as it happens, I _can_ understand this. I’m a scientist.”

“Yeah, what else? Pilot, scientist, prima ballerina maybe?” He mocked, animosity still clearly audible in his tone.

Alice had to give him that. It was not a common combination of skills—and she couldn’t blame him for not believing her.

“Well, I opened the door, didn’t I?” She shook her head, and decided to table the discussion for now. “Now, can we _please_ get out of here?”

Tom stood motionless for a moment, looking at her and fuming silently. She let him cool off, and then he finally nodded grudgingly and moved to gather all the things on the desk. Alice stepped closer to help him, but his instantly hostile reaction had her recoiling with her hands raised.

“Jeez, man, you need anger management therapy or something,” she muttered. “At least let me put the spare mags in my backpack?”

“Fine,” he barked, and Alice did so, keeping well away from the other end of the table where he was reorganizing the binders and rolls of paper to be able to carry them under his left arm, the right kept free to use the pistol he had picked up.

Finally, they headed back out the archive and up the stairs, with Alice checking her life signs detector every now and then, but if the remaining two ravagers were still in the Pentagon, they didn’t come within the device’s range. Alice and Tom came out of the building in the same place where they had entered a couple hours earlier.

“It’s the only spot where you can go in without having to dig in debris and without fear of having the higher floors falling on your head,” Tom said reluctantly when Alice asked.

“How do you know all this? You’ve been here before, after… uh, after the attack?”

He mumbled something under his breath, but then, when pressed, he replied: “I had a briefing, okay? God, you’re so annoying!”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Look who’s talking,” she snapped.

For a moment they remained silent, walking along the building’s wall, avoiding the debris that spilled out from the next crash site. It was only early afternoon and the sun was high up on the sky, beating mercilessly at them and making Alice sweat under her uniform. She didn’t complain or asked to stop, however, until they reached the fence that encircled the entire area and divided it from the empty highway.

“Okay, I gotta ask,” she finally broke the silence as they both were tossing their stuff over the fence—Alice her backpack and Tom his precious papers. He had tied the rolls together with a piece of string he had found Alice knew not where, so they stayed together and didn’t fly off. “Where exactly are we going?”

“ _I_ am going to continue my mission,” he replied testily, throwing his uniform jacket on top of the fence—it had sharp spikes so it wasn’t that easy to hop it without getting at least some protection. “ _You_ should go your own way.”

Alice waited to respond until she was on the other side. “You know full well what is my goal,” she remarked, trying to keep calm, watching him struggle to vault the fence. He was taller than her so he had longer reach, but he was also bigger and, she reminded herself, he had been badly wounded and probably didn’t regain all his strength yet. She would’ve suggested to help him if she didn’t think he would take offense to that. “You’re going to deliver these documents to someone up the chain of command. _Ergo_ , if I go with you, I might find someone who’ll help me.”

He finally managed to get over the fence and landed heavily on the asphalt, breathing quickly. Alice climbed nimbly back up the concrete wall and brought down his jacket. He took it without a word of thanks, but there was resentment, not gratitude in his eyes.

“What is it that you need help with, anyway?” He asked, bending to gather his papers that had spilled all over the ground.

“Well, if I can find out how I got here in the first place, that may give me a clue as to how I can go back home,” she answered truthfully, but it only earned her an exasperated look from him, so she went on: “I’m not supposed to be here. It’s not my reality. I don’t know how I came here, but where I come from, none of this—“ she waved her hand around “—had happened.”

He groaned. “Right, sure. Clearly, there is something wrong with your head, lady.”

Alice puffed. They stood opposite each other on the empty highway—there were only a couple abandoned cars in sight—and she was getting a bad feeling. They were too visible there. They needed to keep moving and find a hiding spot.

“Whatever, man.” She tied her own uniform jacket around her waist, feeling much better only in the black v-neck t-shirt she had had underneath, and pulled her backpack on. “Either way, we gotta go, we’re sitting ducks over here.”

“Let’s go, then,” he agreed and for once his voice sounded completely neutral.

They continued along the highway for a while, going around the channel and then crossing the Potomac via the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge. They skirted around the Capitol Hill, only turning north when they reached the Anacostia river. All this time, Tom kept quiet—Alice wondered if he was still angry at her for whatever reason, or resented her for saving his life, or just thought she was crazy, but even her inbred reticence was tested heavily during the hours and hours of silent marching through the empty streets of Washington, D.C. Thankfully, they didn’t see any dead bodies—it was clear to Alice after a while that Tom knew exactly where to go to avoid them. Still, she kept feeling nauseated with the smell that permeated from the center of the city. She was glad that Tom’s obstinacy had them walking all the way till dusk until they stopped for the night, breaking into someone’s house in Brentwood. At least there, she thought, the smell must have been a phantom, her own imagination.

The house had already been plundered before, but old furniture still remained and, after going through all the cupboards, they even found a few things that might be useful in their trek: a backpack for Tom, so that he wouldn’t need to continue to carry all of the documents under his arm, a blanket, a few pots and pans that looked sturdy enough to withstand being used over open fire, a couple kitchen knives, a spare battery for Alice’s flashlight. They didn’t have any water—with no power, the plumbing didn’t work either—so Alice volunteered to go and get some from the nearby river. She was full of doubt as to whether it would be drinkable, and although the water looked rather clear, she wasn’t going to risk it. Surely, years and years of pollution couldn’t have been undone in the short time since the _New Reality_ had set in, removing most of the sources of pollution—humans. She could only hope that boiling the water would get rid of most of it.

Alice had a bit of food in her backpack, given to her by Ben before she had set off. She now shared what little remained with Tom—eliciting a begrudging _thanks_ —but it was going to be a concern that they needed to think about if they were going to walk much longer.

Sitting on a couch in the living room, with the first hunger and thirst satisfied, Alice decided it was high time to have that talk that they had been avoiding all day.

“Okay,” she said, putting the tin of beans she had just finished on the table in front of the couch. For a post-apocalyptic scenario, it was pretty civilized, she thought to herself with tired amusement. “Now that we’re here and we’re more or less safe, how about you tell me where are we going?”

Tom didn’t reply right away, sipping water from a plastic mug he found in the pantry of the house. “I don’t trust you,” he blurted out after a few moments of silence. “I don’t know what your deal is. I wish you just left me alone.”

“Not a chance.” Alice kept her composure and prepared for a long battle. “I don’t quite understand why you are so determined to distrust me when I’ve only told you the truth.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “What is truth anyway?” And then he added testily after a pause: “You _sound_ crazy enough to be one of the Lambs.”

Alice took a deep breath, telling herself to keep calm. “Well, I’m not. All I know about them is what Ben told me, and that was precious little.”

He only rolled his eyes at that and kept silent.

Alice sighed. “Listen. What I told you—it’s true. I know you don’t know me so my word means nothing to you—but I swear, I’m here by mistake. I’m from a parallel universe where none of this has happened. I’m part of the Atlantis expedition, a Puddle Jumper pilot, part of a science team, and a member of Fourth Atlantis Reconnaissance Team. I went through the Stargate on _my_ Earth and emerged here, and I have no idea how that could’ve happened, or how can I go back.”

He actually got up, frustration on his face, hearing her little outburst. “Listen to yourself!” He snapped. “Parallel universes? You _are_ out of your mind!”

“It’s true!” She rose, too, getting impatient. “Why would I lie about it!”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that you believe it!” He sneered. “I bet it all got confused in your little head! You just saw your whole life go to shit and decided pretending that all of it isn’t real was easier than dealing with the truth!” His voice became louder as he spoke. “But it is real! You can’t change that, so snap out of it! Everyone you ever knew is _dead_! What little humanity is still out there is screwed! We lost!” At this point he was already yelling. “ _This_ is reality!”

They stood next to each other, their eyes locked, Tom breathing heavily and Alice pursing her lips. She told herself again to remain calm. And it was quite easy—because she finally figured out that Tom was not angry with her, not really. He was simply overwhelmed with the whole situation, _furious_ at the circumstances, devastated by what had happened. And Alice couldn’t blame him. His whole world had shattered. Everyone _he_ knew was dead, and their side _did_ lose. All that remained was his loyalty to the service he had dedicated his life to before all of this had started. All that he had, right now, was this one mission.

“Okay,” she said reassuringly and dropped down onto the couch. “I see your point. You can calm down now.”

He continued to stand, his breath getting steadily slower, throwing her murderous looks. She waited patiently until finally he cooled off and sat back down, his face contorted in a contrary expression.

“Let’s start again,” she suggested, trying to sound reasonable. “You don’t believe me, fine. You don’t need to. Look at the facts, though. What do you know about me up till now?” She paused for a moment, and then continued: “You know I have a uniform and military-grade equipment, including weapons. You know I’m a trained marksman, you’ve seen my handiwork. You know I tried to help Ben and his patients while I was there even though I didn’t need to, including giving my own blood.” She didn’t think she needed to remind him that he had benefited from that too. “And you know I’m committed to finding my way to a military command of any kind. You don’t trust me, I get it.” She didn’t trust _him_ entirely, either, after all; she still didn’t tell him she had a Jumper they could use to get to his destination within minutes—once they’d reach the place she had left it at, that is. “But ask yourself this: do you really think I’d go to such lengths just so I could hurt you _now_? I could’ve just let those guys in the Pentagon do their thing.” She shook her head. “Just… let me go with you. Because I’m gonna follow you, whether you like it or not.”

“Ugh,” he groaned, rolling his eyes, but he seemed calm enough for now. “You’re so annoying!” He paused, and then huffed, throwing his hands up in the air: “Fine! You can come with me. But—” he added quickly, his tone guarded “—I am not going to tell you _where_ we’re going. Just in case you _are_ a spy intent on getting that information from me.”

Alice frowned, but then shrugged. “Fine. Deal. But there’s something I need to do first.”

“What?”

“I left something on the road here from Baltimore. I need to go recover that before we set off wherever.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Fine.”

He agreed so easily that Alice figured whatever path he intended to take was going to steer them towards Baltimore again anyway, but she decided to keep that to herself. Once they got to the Jumper, he would need to tell her exactly where to go anyway. At least neither of them would have to tolerate the other for much longer.

They agreed to split the watch during the night, with Alice taking the first half. Despite that, she didn’t think either of them got much sleep. She heard Tom breathe deeply from his place on the couch (the bed mattresses in the house were all missing), but she also saw him observe her from under half-closed eyes a couple times throughout the night. As for herself, she couldn’t really rest either, half-expecting him to just up and disappear into the darkness. So when the horizon on the east began to pale, she got up reluctantly and they both prepared to set off again in a haze of exhaustion.

It was Alice’s second sleepless night in the row, and the lack of food was not a happy circumstance, either. She told herself, though, that it would end soon—they were maybe six hours’ walk from where she had left the Jumper. And with a Jumper they could get literally to any place in the country within fifteen minutes.

It was just after one in the afternoon when they reached the approximate area where Alice had left the Jumper. She ditched a reluctant Tom on the side of the wood and entered it by herself, walking quickly towards where she knew her little spaceship was. She nearly laughed out loud when she finally reached it and saw a number of golden leaves ostensibly levitating a few feet over the ground; the Jumper was cloaked, of course, but it didn’t stop it from being solid, and the leaves simply fell onto its frame. She fished the remote out of her pocket, opened the aft door, went inside—and froze.

The nets that supported all of the gear were slashed and its contents strung along the floor—plastic containers and fabric bags cut into pieces, all the guns and spare ammo gone, med kit gone, all of the already meager equipment gone. But that was not the worst part: the worst part was that the aft control panel was pulled down and half of the crystals removed and smashed into smithereens. With her heart beating so hard she could almost feel it in her throat and feeling a weird dull buzzing in her ears, Alice stepped over the mess on the ground into the forward section. The front window was shattered into thousand smaller and larger chunks that didn’t look like glass fragments at all; this must have been the point of entry of whoever did all this mayhem. Wondering distantly how did they manage to pierce material that withstood atmospheric reentry without issues, Alice leaned over the control panel and put her hand hesitantly on the throttle. Nothing happened. Feeling suddenly weak, she fell onto a seat, ignoring the shattered pieces scattering to the floor as the movement swept them off the chair. She now put both hands on the panel, closed her eyes and willed the little ship to come alive—but it remained dark and silent.


	4. Chapter 3

In the silence that fell after Alice’s last words the knock on the door sounded oddly discordant. They almost forgot where they were, both pulled into the story—Alice reliving it for the first time in its entirety, and the President listening with that kind of revolted fascination that one could watch an excellently produced horror movie.

Alice shivered at the interruption, but then she felt a wave of relief wash over her. It gave her a moment to come to terms with her emotions—to stop their avalanche in its track, and if not work through them, then at least find a way to keep them in check. She didn’t look up at the person that entered the room, instead keeping her gaze low, staring at the coffee table in front of her. She still could taste the desperation on her tongue. Not panic, not anymore—just complete and utter hopelessness. The feeling of emptiness; trying to cry, to _will_ herself to cry—in vain. The despair, dry like paper, hollow, as if the flame that had sustained her died down on its own, leaving a barren husk behind; and no tears to quench it. All of it was coming back now, threatening to consume her once more—she had to snap out of it.

_Name four things you can feel._ She ran her hand over the fabric of the sofa, feeling the velveteen softness of its texture. The other hand was still gripping her wheel cap, her thumb on the broadcloth lining the visor, two fingers on the plastic chin strap, the rest on the polyester crown. The air was warm and humid, probably because one of the bulletproof-glass windows was slightly ajar, reducing the efficiency of air conditioning in the room. Her sweaty cotton shirt was stuck to the skin on her back beneath her service uniform jacket.

_Good. Deep breath._ She exhaled, still without looking up.

Muffled footsteps on the carpet, a low buzz of voices coming from the now-open door, the gentle rustle of paper as it exchanged hands. The President’s deep voice.

“Tell him I’ll have to call him back later.”

“Yes, sir.” A higher tone, a woman’s alto; more footfalls and then the swish and quiet _clack_ of closing door. Only then Alice finally lifted her gaze and encountered the President’s attentive stare, curiosity mixed with pity on his expression. She resisted the urge to look away again.

“I’m sorry, Captain, the business of the nation never really stops,” he said kindly. “Hopefully no more pressing matters interrupt us again—I cleared my entire afternoon for you.”

Alice nodded with a wan smile. “Of course, sir. We’ve been here for over an hour and I’m not even halfway through the story, so I’ll try to cut this down to the essentials…”

“Oh, no, don’t, this is absolutely captivating,” the President protested good-naturedly. “Don’t get me wrong—the details are horrific, but it’s all so fascinating at the same time. I’d like to hear it all.”

She threw him another faint smile and shook her head. “We’d be here for days, sir. After I lost the Jumper, we had to make our way to the command center on foot—and it took a long time. It would be counterproductive to detail the entire tedious journey.”

He looked disappointed, but let it go. “If you say so.” Then, noticing that her glass was almost empty again, he grabbed it and went to refill her water, pouring himself another whisky as well. “Did you figure out what happened to the Jumper?” He prompted, handing her the glass and sitting back down on his sofa.

Alice accepted the drink and took one sip. Then she replaced it on the table and nodded. “My guess is that someone spotted the leaves seemingly hover several feet over the ground, and went in to check it. They only needed to touch around to figure out where the solid metal parts were and then find the windshield. I don’t know if you remember—I mentioned that when I was getting out from beneath the ground where the Stargate was buried, the sheer mass of the falling rocks had chipped the window. I think that weakened the entire structure of the window, and then _I_ exposed it to high degrees of g-force, first by maneuvering to elude the Darts, and then speeding from Colorado to D.C. This must have put enough strain on the impaired material that it became brittle and fragile enough that someone managed to smash it from the outside. As to who that someone was—I have no idea. I doubt it was the Wraith—they must have known what a Jumper is and would probably just take it away. No, I think it was humans who were walking by, and got curious. They pilfered the equipment inside—they must have thought the aft control panel was some sort of a hiding place or something, so they opened it and removed a number of crystals before they realized they were useless for them…”

“I see that you have thought it through carefully,” the President remarked.

“I had a lot of time to obsess over it,” she agreed. “After I came back to Tom, I told him that the thing I had left there was gone, and I think he saw on my face—I mean, he didn’t ask questions. But for the first time that day I really felt trapped in that place, and the bleak hopelessness of my situation scared me more than anything else. The Jumper had been my one real advantage. I had come to that reality through the Gate and, however that had happened, I knew I would need the Gate to go back. But how was I ever to return if it was buried under many tons of molten rock?” She shook her head. “Without the Jumper, I was screwed. Still, I figured making contact with whatever remainders of the Stargate Command of this world there were left was my best chance. So, instead of getting to the command center within minutes as I had planned, I had to stick with Tom—who still wouldn’t tell me where we were going. In fact, he wouldn’t really talk much at all. He would get angry and frustrated when I would ask questions about this world, about the war, anything really beyond our day-to-day—so, in time, I learned to keep my mouth shut. I am not a particularly talkative person by nature myself, but Tom’s reticence was getting even on my nerves.” She shook her head, momentarily amused, but then grew serious again. “We kept walking, and walking, and he never gave me any indication as to what exactly was our destination. From what he had already said and a few additional half-uttered hints he had dropped on the way I figured that he had set off on his mission somewhere in upstate New York, but our path was taking us in a different direction. We were going more west than north, towards Pittsburgh. So apparently we weren’t going back to where he had began—and thus I deduced that the entire military _wasn’t_ gathered somewhere in one place, but rather spread over the country much like the civilian population. But that was the extent of my knowledge—if you could call it that. Each day we would set off at dawn and I never knew if that wasn’t going to be the day when we finally reached our destination. But it never was. We walked, and walked, and walked. Some days we would hike through forests and others we’d sneak through towns. Some nights we’d spend under the open sky, others we’d break into buildings on the way. If we did that, we’d always search them through and sometimes we’d find something useful—even if not for us, then something that could be exchanged for food when we ran into civilians. My life signs detector was of great help in that regard, because people rarely wanted to come out to us, we had to look for them. Most of the time, however, we gathered or hunted our own food. Tom was particularly good at that—tracking game, I mean. I was a better shot so I was usually the one to kill whatever he had tracked, but I’d never have found any animals in the first place had I been on my own. And animals and edible plants—like berries or mushrooms—were plentiful. Nature, finally untamed by people, was quickly reclaiming its lost territories. Quiet and still woods in the light of day were coming alive with wildlife at night. Howling coyotes or wolves, hooting owls, sometimes the sound of hooves as a herd of deer or moose ran by; and the strange greenish glow of bobcat’s eyes reflecting the light of our fire.” She paused for a moment, a light smile on her lips as she remembered those pleasant evenings around a fire and warm nights under the clear sky. “We walked, and days passed, turning into weeks, and then eventually to months. Always going steadily north-west, so it didn’t take me long to realize we were skirting the Great Lakes from the south. I mentioned it once to Tom and he just harrumphed and fell silent. But on the whole, he wasn’t as bad a companion as I had initially thought.” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me anything of substance, but it’s impossible to walk side by side a person for two months and not talk at all. Little things he deemed of no value to a potential spy, I suppose, and he always mentioned them offhandedly, almost by accident… so I found out he had two older brothers who got into Ivy League colleges, and his parents considered him a failure for choosing West Point. Or that he had a fiancée _back home_ , wherever that was, and he never found out if she lived or not.” She paused, caught by surprise by an unexpected emotion. Then she cleared her throat, and continued: “He wasn’t a bad man. But he had lost everything and everyone he ever held dear—and that changes you. They _all_ had lost everything and everyone they loved… All this time and I didn’t meet a single person who managed to hold onto someone from their previous life. Every last child I’ve ever seen there was an orphan.”

She fell silent for a moment, one particular memory resurfacing with sudden force: the image of a little girl, no more than five years old, sitting on a step quietly while a pandemonium exploded around her over a couple amoxicillin. They were visiting one of the outposts in Chicago to trade a bit of meds they had found in a house in the suburbs for food, and unwittingly started a brawl. And as the residents jumped in to separate those fighting, the little girl just sat there, looking at it all with a blank stare, hugging a very tattered and dirty plush bunny. Her empty gaze haunted Alice for a few days afterwards.

The President didn’t interrupt her, the ice in his whisky slowly melting as he held onto the glass without drinking, too enrapt in the story to care.

“Almost two months we walked,” she picked it up after half a minute of quiet retrospection. “We could’ve made a better time if we didn’t have to procure our own food—and if we didn’t help on the way. The things we’ve seen… despite his overt animosity to whoever or whatever impeded his progress towards his destination, Tom wasn’t the kind to look the other way, so we sometimes ended up spending a day or two at an outpost to help out any way we could. We had a few run-ins with ravagers, too, once it even got quite hairy—they outnumbered us four to one. But we had the advantage of actual training, and got away scot-free. We always managed to find a way out of trouble, and I think eventually Tom started to trust me, though ostensibly he would still not utter a peep about where we were going or anything else of import. We grew… accustomed to each other.” She shrugged. “It’s hard not to when you spend every waking moment with the same goddamn person, day in and day out. And as we walked north and time passed, the season was changing around us—it was getting colder and wetter, and what was initially not an unpleasant hike turned into a daily struggle. So you must understand that I was beginning to lose my patience. I just wanted to know where we were going—just to have an idea of the goal, and how much longer we would spend on the road. We had passed Duluth, Minnesota, and were continuing straight north. By my calculations we were getting close to the Canadian border, if there even were such things as borders anymore. And then, one cold, rainy afternoon, after a whole day of treading along a deep forest, finally Tom took pity on me and announced we were almost there. I don’t know how he knew, he didn’t have a map or anything—frankly I’m sure I would have been lost without him. But he said we would arrive the next day, or the day after that at the most, and I have to admit I felt a great sense of relief. No matter what I was going to find there, surely it must be better than what I’d seen so far, right?” She sighed. ”Well, after one more day of plodding through the wet and cold woods, we arrived at the foot of a small hill, devoid of trees. It was already getting dark around us, and I couldn’t quite see anything noteworthy about the place, but Tom stopped there, took a deep breath, and proclaimed that we were there. Hallelujah! Except we were in the middle of a dense wood, so it took me by surprise. I thought there would be at least some structure—but it turned out that when Ben told me the military _went underground_ , it was in the literal sense…”

*

The foot of the little hill in frot of them was covered in low shrubbery. From among the evergreen leaves and naked branches peaked out bright red winterberries. Tom leaned over one of those bushes and reached into it, deeper and deeper—and then straightened back up slowly, the shrub coming off the ground with an audible creak, the dirt spilling over to the sides. Alice didn’t really know what she was looking at until the movement stopped, the shrub now sticking out from a vertical, round wall—and finally she realized what it was: a manhole cover. It was so well hidden beneath the plants that there was absolutely no way to find it unless you knew where to look.

“You first,” Tom prompted her, pointing into the long, dark shaft, rain droplets falling down and disappearing into blackness. Alice sighed—she didn’t like underground tunnels since that one mission where she got a whiff of poison air, tumbled down a deep hole, fought a wild creature with fire, and then had to face her biggest fears induced by toxic vapors. With a mixture of apprehension and expectant relief, she squared her shoulders, fastened her P90 to the vest so that it wouldn’t bang against the ladder, and stepped over the hole cautiously. Going down she counted the rungs and just came up to thirty when her foot hit the ground. She jumped off and quickly turned on her flashlight, shining it first around her at the well-like room and then up at Tom. He was about halfway down, the heavy metal cover replaced in its place already. He was by her side a moment later.

“What now?” She asked quietly, expecting her voice to echo, but it didn’t; it eerily reminded her of the tunnels of M2F-221, where the walls were made of sound-absorbing material. She tried to shake off the feeling, but it still crept up at her.

“There should be a door over there. Can you…?” Tom waved at the wall opposite the ladder. She shone the light there and indeed they saw a heavy steel-reinforced concrete door. There was no handle there, but a panel to the side. Tom walked up there and it came alive with a focused ray of blue light of its own.

“Another retinal scanner?” Alice asked from behind him.

“I bet you couldn’t open that one,” he asserted confidently. “This one was designed by the Stargate people.” The scan complete, the little screen now showed a small keyboard and Tom paused to concentrate on inputting the right code. “Thankfully, we don’t need to break in _here_.”

The door hissed and slowly began to open sideways, sliding into the wall. As it did, light from the other side flooded their small room, and Alice clicked the torch off. It was mounted on her gun, and she still had it in hand when Tom stepped through and she followed, immediately coming to a halt a step beyond the threshold.

They were in a wider corridor now, and they weren’t alone; eight men in camouflage uniforms stood around, waiting for them to come in, all armed with assault rifles, all aimed at them. Alice’s first instinct was to raise her P90, but with these kind of odds, it would be suicide. So, instead, she slowly put it down so that it dangled from her vest, and put her hands up. Tom’s M16 was still hanging on the strap off his shoulder and he made no movement to grab it.

“Captain Tom Sato, US Army,” he said in a clear—almost triumphant—voice, his entire posture projecting calm pride. “Identification Alpha November Yankee Charlie One Two Two Six, mission codename Limerick, mission status: accomplished!”

The entry guards exchanged looks and lowered their weapons, though they kept their hands on them. One of them—Alice recognized the triple chevrons and crossed rifles of a Marine sergeant—cleared his throat and asked:

“And her?” He nodded his head at Alice.

She opened her mouth to speak, but Tom was quicker. “She’s with me,” he blurted out.

The sergeant threw Alice a prolonged stare, but then shrugged. “Welcome to the HQ. Please surrender your weapons to be allowed inside.”

Immediately, Tom handed over his rifle, sidearm, and a couple knives he had picked up on the way. Alice, much more reluctantly, unhooked her P90, removed the Beretta from the holster and her trusted knife from its sheath and put them into the waiting arms of a very young Marine on her right. Thus disarmed, they were marched off by one of the fireteams along the corridor and through another door to arrive at a security station, manned similarly by a squad of eight Marines. There, they had to surrender all of their possessions, including both their packs and Alice’s tactical vest, and then they were walked through what Alice assumed must have been a metal detector. Only then, many pounds lighter but feeling slightly wrong without their stuff—at least on Alice’s part—they were allowed into an elevator on the other side of the corridor. This all looked very familiar to Alice, bringing a pang of unexpected longing after the Stargate Command—where she had spent maybe a week total over several years. Still, it was part of her world, the world she knew and missed—the world she might not have a chance to see ever again. But that kind of thinking put her in danger of having a breakdown, so she pushed it away and wondered instead what powered this hidden structure—it wasn’t like there were any functioning power plants left anywhere in the country. A diesel generator maybe? Or perhaps something more modern—like a Naquadah reactor?

They stepped off the elevator and were shown into a sparsely furnished room that looked almost like a carbon copy of the SGC’s interrogation room. They sat down on one side of the table in the middle, leaving the other for the inevitable higher rank officer that, Alice knew, had to come debrief them before they’d be allowed to roam the place freely.

“Someone will be with you shortly,” the sergeant informed them. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

_YES_ , Alice screamed inside her head, but held her tongue, limiting herself to throwing a pleading look at Tom. He didn’t disappoint.

“That would be great,” he replied; his voice was still filled with the strange buoyancy Alice had never heard in it before—and credited in equal measure to accomplishing his mission _and_ finally reaching their destination, which meant no more walking, no more eating half-raw or charred meat eight nights out of ten, and no more drinking muddy waters from rivers and streams along the way.

The sergeant nodded and left them without another word. Alice noted the click after he closed the door that announced they were now effectively prisoners—at least until proven harmless, she hoped.

They sat in silence, just thawing after the whole day of a laborious trek in cold and wet. Alice always tried to keep in good shape and worked out often, but nothing had prepared her for these two months of slow, methodical, and seemingly endless walking; her legs had gotten stronger, but her feet were killing her every time she had a chance to sit down. Now, having finally reached their goal, she felt herself decompress and nearly drifted off to sleep when another click and then squeak of the door brought her back to the land of the living.

A young Army soldier came in with a tray that he deposited in front of them with a quiet _here you go, sirs_. Alice didn’t even notice—she was used to being addressed _sir_ or being counted as one of the _guys_. Tom thanked the soldier and the man retreated, locking them in again. They both didn’t lose thought on that one, but dug in quickly into their food: a thin soup with a couple carrots floating in it and a chicken stir-fry with colorful vegetables. It was more than Alice had a chance to eat in one go since she had come through the Gate to this world; and the best part wasn’t even the amount, or the variety—it was the spices. Alice had almost forgotten how good food could be with a pinch of salt and pepper and a bit of basil and oregano. And the water—which came in a big jug—was so wonderfully pure and cool! After she finished eating, Alice sat back in her chair—which, under normal circumstances, could hardly be called comfortable, but to her now it seemed like a throne—with a glass and continued to drink with small sips, just savoring the crystal quality of the water.

Some fifteen minutes later the Army soldier came back to collect the tray, but this time he wasn’t alone; as Alice had predicted, he was followed by an officer; only she didn’t expect that he would be a major general. Both Alice and Tom jumped to their feet as he entered, a habit so ingrained into them that even the end of the world as they knew it couldn’t erase it.

“Sit down,” the general waved them down and took a seat opposite them. He was younger than most general officers Alice knew: in his early forties, though his hair was completely grey—in fact, in the dark room it looked white. He was wearing an Army combat uniform much like Tom’s, though his was in pristine condition while Tom’s was showing the wear and tear one would expect after more than two months on the road. Alice’s own clothing didn’t look much better.

Another soldier tailgated the general, carrying Alice and Tom’s backpacks and other things they had previously surrendered at the security checkpoint. Alice assumed they had searched them thoroughly and determined that nothing in there was dangerous. He deposited all the stuff on the table and then left, locking the door behind him.

“I’m Major General Taylor Spooke,” he announced matter-of-factly. “I’m the Chief of Staff of the Army, for what it’s worth in this shitshow that has become our world.”

Alice arched her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. The Joint Chiefs were, by law, always four-star generals. She figured in this _shitshow_ some corners must have been cut, though—there was no more Senate to confirm military promotions or appointments, for one.

“Captain Sato, your New York CO informed me of your mission before you set out,” the general continued. “To be honest I didn’t believe in its success. We’d sent at least three other parties to accomplish it before and none of them ever returned. But—“ He reached into Tom’s backpack and pulled out one of the binders from the Pentagon archive “—I am a big enough man to admit that I was wrong. These papers and plans might just give us the boost we need. Do you even know what they are?”

Tom’s face was empty as he stared at the general. “No, sir.” He hesitated and then added: “My understanding is that they are unfinished projects that could help us defeat the Wraith.”

“That’s right. Provided that we can finish them. Most of our best people are gone, but there’s still a few eggheads around.” Spooke smirked and Sato followed suit, and it made Alice wonder if there was some double meaning to that statement that she didn’t get. “Still, we have to start somewhere. Good job, Captain!”

“Thank you, sir.” Tom nodded, his voice regaining the earlier prideful buoyancy. Then he peeked at Alice from the corner of his eyes, and added a little grudgingly: “She helped.”

“Did she, now?” The general’s eyes moved from Tom to Alice and he gave her a careful look, from the top of her red head to the broken and dirty nails on her hands, laying on the table.

“Yes, sir, she opened the archive door at the Pentagon. I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own. I took a former Pentagon employee with me for that, but he was injured on the way and I had to leave him behind with the civilians. She opened the door, helped me get rid of some ravagers on my tail, and then supported me on our way here.”

Alice rolled her eyes hearing him describe her foray into the Pentagon after him as “helping him get rid of ravagers”, since he _got rid of_ exactly one—compared to her nine.

“Very good,” Spooke opined, his eyes boring into Alice’s face now. He sounded pensive, though. “You look very familiar to me, miss. Have we met?”

Alice raised her eyebrows again and then shrugged. “I don’t know if you’ve ever met me. I know I haven’t met you before,” she replied thoughtfully. Perhaps there _was_ an alternative version of her in this reality, and the man had briefly come in contact with her before—which would explain the feeling of familiarity without recognition.

“That’s a very convoluted answer,” he noted, a bit miffed. “But your voice sounds really familiar, too… who are you, exactly?”

Alice heard Tom sigh loudly, and she threw him a quick glance. He was looking at her significantly, shaking his head infinitesimally, as if he wanted to say: _don’t. Don’t tell him the same story you tried to sell me._ But this was _exactly_ why Alice had wanted to come here, to meet a senior officer that could potentially explain some things to her and maybe help her go home, if she were really lucky.

“I’m Captain Alice Boyd,” she replied truthfully and observed Spooke’s eyebrows race up and then down into a deep frown as she continued: “I come from an alternative reality where I am part of the Atlantis Expedition, and the Wraith _hadn’t_ invaded the Earth—or at least they didn’t succeed,” she amended, remembering the Super-Hive attack. “I came through the Stargate in a Puddle Jumper and found myself here—in a cave created by the Gate’s unstable vortex under thousands of tons of molten rock. I managed to get out using a drone and land near Baltimore, which is where I met Captain Sato. My Jumper, unfortunately, was damaged beyond my ability to mend it, so we had to take a walk to get here,” she finished. She had figured that now that she was there, and with the Jumper out of service anyway, she could finally reveal its existence.

Her words were followed by a long moment of silence, in which the general continued to stare at her, frowning, and Tom put his hand to his temple as if she had given him a headache.

Finally, Spooke repeated after her, his voice doubtful: “Alternative reality, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

Another minute went by without any reaction from his part. Alice was starting to feel uncomfortable under his piercing gaze.

“You came in a Jumper,” he eventually said, a strange finality in his tone now. “That’s where you got this from.” And he reached into her backpack, which was also on the table in front of him, and pulled out a life signs detector. It remained dark in his hand.

“Yes, sir. It was very useful to track down the bad guys inside the Pentagon after Captain Sato went in,” she elaborated, because she felt the atmosphere change into something weird she didn’t really understand.

“And your uniform—that’s a standard Atlantis uniform, isn’t it?” He continued in the same odd tone.

“Yes, sir. I’d removed the patches before I first ventured out from my Jumper after landing, but I still have them.” And she plunged her hand into a pocket and brought out the two patches she normally wore on her sleeves: the Atlantis badge, with the name of the city above a prancing winged horse, representing the Pegasus Galaxy; and a flag of the United States.

The general reached across the table to take the two patches in his hands. They were in an excellent condition compared to Alice’s uniform’s overall state, since she had kept them in her pocket all this time.

Suddenly, Spooke stood up, prompting the two of them to jump to their feet, too.

“I’m going to need to leave you for a moment, now,” he said, not unkindly, addressing Alice more than Tom. “If you need something, ask the soldier outside.”

And he stepped to the door, knocked on it twice, and was let out by the guard, leaving the two of them behind, somewhat confused at the abruptness of his retreat.

“He believed you?” Tom asked incredulously. He was shaking his head a little.

“I’m not sure,” Alice admitted. “He acted very odd.”

Tom shrugged and they both fell silent for a moment. He spoke again a few minutes later:

“You’ve never told _me_ about the Jumper. That the thing you wanted to collect on the road between D.C. and Baltimore?”

She nodded. “I had followed you in the Jumper, but at some point I lost all sensors—I think there was some electromagnetic radiation field hampering their operation. At any rate, I had to land and follow you on foot, otherwise I’d’ve lost you, and you were my only chance of finding my way here. But when we came back, the Jumper was ransacked and a vital part of it destroyed. I couldn’t mend it, not without spare parts, which of course I didn’t have…” She sighed. “So we had to walk all the way here. With a Jumper, we could’ve made this trip in a few minutes—literally.”

“Would’ve been nice,” Tom agreed grudgingly. “But more to the point, we could have used the Jumper against the Wraith.”

Alice didn’t respond to that. If she still had her Jumper, she didn’t think she’d allow it to be used in the fight against this reality’s Wraith—not if it put it in danger, anyway. She needed that ship to get back to her own world. Without it, her chances were really slim to none.

They waited in silence after that. Half an hour has passed without anyone coming in, and eventually Alice excused herself to Tom and asked the guard outside to escort her to the restroom. When she got back, Spooke was already there, waiting for her.

“Come with me,” he said and both Alice and Tom followed him along the corridor, then down a few more levels on the elevator, and finally into a large room that looked like a set from a sci-fi movie: with a humongous flat screen on one wall, it was filled with multiple desks orientated towards the screen, each holding at least a couple monitors; each row was set on a pedestal higher than the previous one, creating a sort of an auditorium of computers. People in various uniforms manned each workstation; among the military camouflage patterns Alice discerned a few people wearing civilian clothes, but they were in distinct minority.

On the lowest level, near the flat screen on the wall that currently displayed the map of America with a number of red, yellow and green dots in clusters, stood a group of people engaged in a conversation: a few service members, surrounding a couple people in business suits. Spooke steered them towards them, and then stood a few paces back, cleared his throat, and said:

“Excuse me, Madam President?”

The people in uniforms parted to make way and the two civilians turned around to look at the newcomers.

Alice’s eyes rested on the face of the woman opposite her, and she felt her breath catch in her throat. And suddenly, all the puzzles fell into place in her mind, and she knew she had been mistaken. She knew, and it made her mind go blank for a moment while her heart went into overdrive.

She had been mistaken. It wasn’t an alternative reality.

It was the future.

*

“It was like staring into a distorted mirror.” Alice looked away from the President’s face, the force of the memory strong enough to make her lips go dry again and send her heart into a frantic dance, just like then. She paused for a moment, and then continued: “She didn’t look quite like I do. Her hair was long and all silver, with no hint of red; her face was gaunt and lined with wrinkles; her skin looked thin and dry, and almost translucent. But she was exactly my height, and she had my green eyes, and even though they looked more pronounced in her, she still had my features: my cheeks and my chin and my stupid pointy nose…” Alice stopped, feeling a chill creep up her back. She was still hot under her uniform jacket, so it had nothing to do with temperature. She swallowed hard and peeked at the President to check his expression: it was a mixture of incredulous and enraptured. He didn’t interrupt her, totally enthralled by the story. “I could see why General Spooke felt a sense of familiarity when he looked at me, but couldn’t immediately tell who I was. First of all, nobody really looks at a person and goes _that’s a younger version of that woman I know!_ More likely you’d think they’re related. And secondly, there really was a lot of difference between us. I mean… when we stood next to each other, you could see the resemblance clearly, but apart? Not so easy, unless you knew _her_ when she was younger… And Spooke _couldn’t_ have known her then. He was in his early forties—but she was in her late sixties, maybe even older. At least twenty-five years of age difference, maybe more.” Alice shook her head. As they spoke, Taylor Spooke was out there somewhere—a baby, a toddler at most. It felt very odd to realize that. And Tom Sato was not even born yet.

“How did it feel? Looking at yourself in forty years’ time?” The President asked eagerly as soon as she fell silent.

Alice sighed. “Very weird. Stupid stuff came to my head. Things like— _gosh, I’m glad I don’t get fat when I’m old_ , or— _I guess I never get that tan I’ve always dreamed of_.” She half-smiled at the memory. “But these thoughts disappeared very quickly, pushed away by growing concern and fear. I wasn’t in some alternative reality that I could somehow escape—this was the future. _My_ future. A future in which, somehow, the Wraith had won, and everything _I’d_ ever known or loved was lost. How did that happen? What has led me to this point? And how the hell did _I_ become a president?!” She shook her head again, blushing a little—it was odd speaking of this in front of the _current_ president. “I had so many questions in my head. But, as I stood there, for the moment rooted to my spot, trying to work through this whole thing, I was realizing that there had been hints of this before that I simply ignored because they didn’t fit with my alternate reality theory. The fact that I had left _my_ Earth in mid-March—but arrived _there_ in early September. The fact that it’s only been three years since the Super-Hive attack, and I assumed that was the point of divergence for that reality—yet the state of the world around me clearly screamed that this whole war has been going on for longer than that. Even the damn camouflage pattern that I didn’t recognize and supposed was a simple variance in realities…” She stopped abruptly. She was getting emotional—frustration at her own blindness and ignorance bubbled up again. She temporized by reaching out for her glass. The clear, cool water and a couple deep breaths allowed her to calm down enough to continue. “I stood there, unable to move, for a good ten seconds. Nobody said anything, not even _her_. We just looked at each other; I couldn’t peel my eyes off her face. I scrutinized each line, each imperfection of her skin, the curve of her mouth, the faded green of her irises. I saw her hands, her swollen fingers contorted with arthritis. I noticed old scars on the back of her palms, and one crescent one going from her ear to the middle of her cheek, so pale that it was almost white. Marks of age and experience, of a whole life I had not lived yet. But she stood straight and positively _exuded_ authority in a way I could never imagine to. The more I looked at her, the less it seemed possible that she was _me_. And then she spoke, and her voice _was_ my voice, only a little higher—but it didn’t tremble or squeak the way it often happens with old people. She looked me in the eye and said…”

*

How does it feel “to look into your own future?”

Alice opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find any words. She looked around at Tom—his eyes were wide and his head was snapping this way and that as he tried to reconcile the two persons. For a second she wondered how much he must have been in denial to actually know her name, see her, and never connect her to this older version of herself. But then she turned back to look at herself again and once more tried to find something to say, in vain.

Her older self smiled in a kindly way. “It’s okay. Take your time. Words were never our strength.”

_Our._ _Goodness, she really is me._ “How did _you_ end up a president?!” She blurted the first thing that came into her head.

The future Alice laughed, but her entourage looked miffed at the question. She didn’t let them voice their discontent, though. “Trust me, I know how you feel. In fact, I _remember_ —I would never have guessed this is who I’d end up being when I was your age.”

This was a bit convoluted and Alice felt a pang of ache in her temple. “But I…” She looked around helplessly. “I don’t understand. I have so many questions!”

“I bet you have. I have some for you, as well. But first things first. General Spooke told me you came in a Jumper but that it was damaged? How badly?”

“Um…” Alice told herself to focus, but her thoughts continued to drift distractedly. “The aft control panel had at least half of the crystals pulled and smashed into bits. And the front window was broken, but that was of lesser import. I couldn’t put the controls together with so many crystals missing.”

The president—Alice decided to call her that in her mind, for using her own name for this old stranger was too freaky—exchanged a look with the man who stood beside her. It was actually the first time Alice noticed him. He was much younger—like her own age, maybe a few years older. He had black hair and green eyes, and he towered over the president by at least ten inches. There was something familiar about his features, though, but Alice’s brain refused to process that information for the moment.

“Do you remember where you left it?”

Alice felt her eyebrows rise up. “Why?”

“Well, we’re going to try to fix it, of course,” the president replied calmly. “Just tell us where it is.”

Alice’s eyebrows went down into a frown. She looked around at Tom again, but his face was blank now, so she turned back and said, hesitantly: “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.”

Surprise registered on the president’s face. _Damn, I really_ am _an open book when it comes to emotions_ , Alice thought offhandedly.

“You don’t trust me?” The president let out a little whiff of laughter. “You realize that I _am_ you?”

“No, _I_ am you,” Alice replied a bit doubtfully. “You’ve been me, but I’ve never been you. There’s forty years of life in you I haven’t experienced.” She shrugged. “Excuse me if I’m a little apprehensive.”

“Well, you’re not wrong,” the president admitted, and there was something in her eyes that tugged at Alice’s heartstring. “Okay, then. Let’s get acquainted a bit. Ricky, can you please ask our science department to start preparing?” She addressed the young civilian man standing next to her.

“Yeah, sure, ma’am,” he acknowledged and walked away immediately.

“Gentlemen, carry on. General Spooke, please take care of Captain Sato,” the president ordered, and her voice carried a ring of authority that betrayed a lifetime of being obeyed. Then she turned to Alice. “Come with me, then.”

Throwing one more look to Tom, who, she felt, had become her anchor to the uncomplicated era when she still believed in the alternate reality theory, Alice followed her older self to a door on the other side of the command center, and then through a maze of corridors and elevators.

“When was all of this built?” She asked as they walked.

“The construction began fifteen years ago,” the president replied casually. “It was the first big thing I managed to push through the Congress, back when I was a newbie at the DoD. The Program was still classified at that point, but a lot of people in the Congress knew about it already and somehow I managed to convince enough of them to fund it. I hoped it would eventually replace the SGC—there’s more space here and it’s far more secure—but in the end, I didn’t get to enact that particular plan.”

Alice was silent for a moment, and then said quietly: “I saw what was left of the SGC. What happened there?”

The president didn’t reply because they arrived at a nondescript door that looked just like any other that they had passed on the way. There was a panel instead of a doorknob; she entered a code and it hissed open. Behind it was a large room so incongruous with the cold industrial décor elsewhere that it made Alice stop in her tracks. Lush green carpet covered the floor, pistachio-colored walls were full of works of art and book-laden shelves, a small but beautiful mahogany table stood to one side with four chairs around it, and on the other side there was a comfortable-looking couch.

“These are my private quarters,” the president announced and walked to a small cabinet that held a couple bottles. “Would you like a drink?”

“Yes, please,” Alice answered without thinking. She felt like she needed something strong to combat the emotions swelling inside her. It was odd—at the same time she was almost choking with too many feelings at once, but it also seemed like she wasn’t actually _herself_ either. Like she was observing herself from outside, like she wasn’t real anymore. In a distant manner, she realized she was disassociating—a term she knew because it was one of the early symptoms of her mom’s, but had never felt like this herself before.

“Let’s sit.” The president handed her a glass with whisky in it and gestured towards the sofa.

“I like whisky now?” Alice’s voice rose up in surprise.

“No, but there’s no more wine anywhere to be had and you look like you need something stronger anyway.”

Alice held the glass up, cocking her head to the side. Then she shrugged. “You’re not wrong.” And she downed the entire drink in one big gulp, and consequently was overcome with a coughing fit for a moment.

The president was observing her with raised eyebrows, her own glass containing only water.

“This is a bit eerie, I have to admit,” she said after Alice had finally recovered. “Seeing myself from so many years ago again… I almost forgot my hair was so short then. And so damn _red_!” She laughed, but there was a somber quality to her expression.

“Trust me, it’s much weirder for me,” Alice countered, her voice still a little hoarse from almost choking on the whisky. “But—wait. Don’t you _remember_ meeting yourself when you were younger? I mean, you _are_ me, so—“

“It doesn’t work like that.” The president shook her head, an indulgent smile playing on her lips. “You should know better. _I_ never went into the future.” She paused, growing more serious. “Don’t you think I’d find a way to stop the Wraith invasion if I had known?”

Alice opened her mouth, thought for a moment, and closed it. Frowning, she tried to reconcile whatever she knew about time travel with her current situation. She knew she wasn’t the first one to do it; information related to time travel was heavily classified, even within the Stargate Program, but there were rumors—that the original SG-1 once visited the past, and that Colonel Sheppard ended up in the future. There were no details provided, though, or at least none that Alice could truly believe—one version claimed that Sheppard had to fight sandworms in some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, for example. The colonel himself would just roll his eyes or laugh at any attempts at getting the truth from him.

“There is no one true timeline,” the president explained kindly, seeing Alice’s deep frown. “You weren’t _really_ wrong in thinking that you’ve traveled to an alternative reality. They’re not _parallel_ , but they are very different. In my reality, let’s call it A, I never left my timeline. Everything that happened led me to here. But there was a second reality, B. In B, you went through the Stargate straight to A—forty years later or so. Which means there is a parallel world somewhere where you’re gone—and it’s probably somewhat different to mine. Without any false modesty, I’ve had some impact on how the events unrolled—that impact is missing in your original reality, forty years on from the moment you’d left.”

“But I’m gonna go back,” Alice remarked. “I _need_ to find a way to go back. And if I do—“

“If you do, then you won’t be coming back to your own reality, not really,” the president continued calmly. “If you manage to come back, with all the knowledge and experience you’ve gained here, you will not be going back to B—instead, your return will create a new offshoot world, C.”

Alice nodded. “Okay, I get it. Every decision or event is splitting the realities further—even when it comes to time-jumping.”

“Yes. Although from your point of view, it might look linear, it really isn’t.” The president smiled mirthlessly. “But I am curious. How _exactly_ did you end up here?”

Alice sighed, but figured there was really no point in hiding the truth. She related the story, keeping it as short as possible. She only left out the information where the Jumper was, thought she realized, as she spoke, that Tom knew the general area where she had left it—that was probably enough to be able to find it, if one knew what they were looking for.

The president didn’t interrupt, but listened intently. When Alice finished, she nodded as if it confirmed something she had previously guessed, and said: “Not bad for government work, as my husband used to say. I’m glad you found your way here.”

Alice felt her eyebrows race up at the mention of a husband, but decided to put that particular line of questioning away for the moment. “Me, too,” she replied. “I couldn’t think of any other way to get help to get back home.”

The president’s face grew very grave. “You understand that we have no way of sending you home, though, don’t you?”

Alice didn’t respond right away. She took a deep breath and licked her suddenly dry lips. “It’s been forty years. Surely you have some sort of technology… some way to…” She stopped, not knowing what to say.

The president was shaking her head. Her eyes were pitying. “I’m sorry. We don’t.”

Alice looked away and for a couple minutes they were both silent.

“The Time Jumper was destroyed during the initial attack,” the president resumed finally. “When the Groom Lake facility was targeted. But it only made jumps few hundred years long, you wouldn’t have been able to use it to go back to your time. And we don’t have any way to predict solar flares, so even if we managed to fix your Jumper and open the Stargate, it wouldn’t help you get back.”

Alice turned to look at her again. “What about our allies? Surely there have to be someone… the Tok’ra or the Nox…”

“I’m sorry. There’s no one. The Wraith have done away with them even before turning on us. They’ve been in our galaxy for many, many years…”

“Wha… how… why didn’t you stop them?!” Alice felt a sudden wave of rage. It prompted her to jump to her feet. “If you knew they were here, why didn’t you stop them?!”

The president sighed. “It’s not that easy. We didn’t even know they were here for a long time, and when we found out, it was too late—their numbers were already big enough to overwhelm us.”

Alice turned around and walked a few steps towards the door, as if wanting to leave; instead, she stopped in the middle of the room and just stood there for a long moment, trying to control her stormy emotions. She didn’t want the president to see her face—even though it used to be the president’s face, too… _This is so fucked up._

“So I’m stuck here?” She choked out eventually, after a good minute of silent struggle.

The older woman didn’t beat around the bush. “Yes,” she replied curtly, but there was an audible undertone of pity in her voice. It made it worse.

“I need a moment,” Alice mumbled, and then asked louder: “Where’s the restroom?”

“The door to your right.”

Inside, hunched over the sink, Alice splashed some water on her face, but didn’t have courage enough to look at herself in the mirror; not yet, at least. Instead, she just let the water run over her outstretched fingers, unseeing eyes fixed on a single spot.

She was stuck. She would never see the people she loved again—here, they were all gone, and even if not, they’d be forty years older; strangers, really. Stuck with _herself_ , to boot—a version of herself she would never be, now. And here, of all places—in this empty, desolate world, where the very few remaining people struggled desperately to survive. Not even to live—just to survive…

She slid down onto her knees in front of the sink and covered her face in her hands. He heart was racing and her breathing was quick and shallow. It was as if no air was coming in; she was falling… no, it was the walls crushing down on her. She was trapped, locked in a dungeon again, with no faint glimmer of hope, no way of escape… and yet, she remembered suddenly, she did escape. She’d won against Jareth—she _hadn’t_ crumbled to pieces in his prison, and she _had_ found a way to survive—to escape—to bring help to the others who had been similarly captured. She’d done it once. Couldn’t she do it again?

She picked herself up from the floor and, gathering her strength, resolutely looked into the mirror. Watching her older self all this time almost made her forget just how young she still looked; it was such a stark contrast that she instantly forgave Tom and Spooke for not recognizing her immediately.

There had to be a way. Maybe they’d made some discovery within those forty years that would help her—maybe they didn’t even know that they had the key. Or maybe she could find a way to make a jump to yet _another_ reality—one that wasn’t hopelessly locked in a losing battle with the Wraith and _could_ help her go back to her own time. She would find a way, she decided; or otherwise die trying.

Making that decision, headlong and mulish as it was, was a relief. Even if the hope was faint and specious, it gave her a new purpose. One could not lose themselves to despair if one had purpose; and false hope was better than no hope at all.

With her heartbeat slowing down, Alice took a few deep breaths, splashed some more water on her face, turned off the tap, and walked back into the main room, where the president was still waiting for her patiently.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said, sitting back down on the couch opposite the older woman. “I guess I needed a moment to come to terms with this.”

The president smiled sadly. “Of course. I am the last person to begrudge you for that.” She paused for a beat, and then added a bit hesitatingly: “We’ve all been through trauma in the past ten years or so.”

Alice recognized her own unwillingness to speak of emotions and feelings in the president’s reluctance. She nodded and then sighed. “Alright. Let’s get through this, then. I’m sure I’m keeping you from something—I know myself well enough to figure you’re probably working constantly.”

The president chuckled and then shrugged. “Some things never change.”

“So. Tell me everything,” Alice requested. “I’m stuck here anyway, so you don’t need to spare any details.”

The president smiled wanly, then sighed and nodded. And started talking.

*

“That must have been hard,” the President commented when Alice stopped to gather her wits for a moment. “To realize you’re irrevocably trapped in such a bleak situation…”

She nodded. “But it wasn’t the hardest—I didn’t really have time to contemplate. The hardest was later, at night, when I was suddenly faced with the enormity of it all, alone in the darkness…” She shivered and then shook her head. She didn’t want to go there. “At any rate, despite this heavy burden weighing on my shoulders, I was eager to know what had led them to that point. I wasn’t disappointed. She told me everything—we spent hours there that day, and then there’s some more details I found out later. Now, I will not share everything I learned with you, sir—I can’t.”

“Yeah, but why? You came back, which means whatever happened _there_ cannot happen here now, can it?”

Alice shook her head again. “There are still things that may happen. Remember that they didn’t even know about the Wraith being in our galaxy for a long time. And at any rate if you knew what happened _there_ , it might influence how you’d act _here_ , and that is not a very good idea.”

“Why not? If I could avoid some mistakes, wouldn’t that be a good thing?” The President contradicted, raising his eyebrows.

She smiled sadly. “Mistakes are part of life. If you correct one, you’ll inevitably make a different one. Trust me, it’s better that way.”

He didn’t look pleased, but allowed her to go on with a nod and a wave of his hand.

She took a deep breath. “She told me that for a long time they didn’t know when or how the Wraith found their way into the Milky Way. They first started hearing rumors about a new sort of enemy in 2017, and soon thereafter they figured out it must have been the Wraith. They brought some personnel back from Atlantis, people who knew the Wraith, their tactics, vulnerabilities, their m.o., to help find them and destroy them before they became a problem. But the Wraith were crafty—more so than those in the Pegasus, and eluded them for a long time. Oh, they found some small groups from time to time, got a few ships, but never found their main bases of operation. They played a game of cat and mouse for eight more years, before the Wraith finally showed their true colors and began a bona fide culling. They still avoided Earth and instead targeted other planets, and _hard._ Human and Jaffa worlds were crumbling one by one, and although the rest rallied together against this new common enemy, they were not a match for them. Even the strongest of the Jaffa could not do anything against the Darts grabbing them off the surface of their planet, and once they found themselves in a cocoon, it was too late… and the years of strife—first against the Goa’uld, then the Replicators, then the Ori—have left them with precious little in terms of fleet strength. There simply weren’t enough ships to fight the oncoming waves of Hives. The Wraith were winning. As was the case in the Pegasus, there were too many of them, and they just… kept coming. Because of the delay at the beginning, the Wraith managed to grow in numbers beyond anyone’s expectation… The SGC did everything in their power to stop them, but it’s a really big galaxy—many orders of magnitude bigger than Pegasus, and finding something here is therefore much more difficult. They eventually managed to locate and destroy the Wraith cloning facility, but it was too late—there were already millions of them. Even with all the cunning and all the technological advancement, the SGC was not able to make much of a dent. They’d get rid of one Hive only to be chased away by five more; they’d kill a dozen warriors only to be attacked by twenty more. The Wraith were using the drones as cannon fodder—didn’t really care how many of them died, if only they advanced far enough. And, one by one, worlds continue to fall. Those that the Wraith couldn’t feed upon, they simply eradicated; others were culled mercilessly, with no regard for potential repopulation—which was the Wraith’s standard tactic in the Pegasus before we came. It took _time_ —over twenty five years, actually. And still, they never made a move against Earth… until, finally, one day, there were no more worlds to cull. Except Earth.”

She paused for a moment, just to allow the President to work through what she’d already said. He sat there, opposite her, legs crossed, brow furrowed, looking at her in focused silence.

“When they attacked, the Earth was well-prepared. They’d recalled Atlantis and had been producing ships for a long while, and had quite a few of them still, even though they’d lost a fair amount in the intervening years. They were able to push back at first, and had some early wins. But the Wraith never stopped, they just kept coming at them, incessantly, tirelessly, constantly. And, eventually, they begun finding holes in their defense, little cracks that they could exploit to get down onto the planet surface.”

“That must have made the whole situation a whole more difficult,” the President noted, interrupting her for the first time in a while. “I cannot imagine the panic when people suddenly found out all of this is real.” He made an indeterminate gesture.

Alice cocked her head to the right, wondering how much she should say, but then decided it was so far into the future it didn’t really matter all that much. “They already knew,” she confessed. “My… um… the other Alice told them. She was named the Defense Secretary a couple years before the invasion, and when it started, she went against the orders of the president at the time. First she made sure the entirety of the US armed forces were told, and then went on air to make a public announcement. She was promptly fired, imprisoned and charged with treason. She spent about a year in jail, but then she was let go—for when the Earth’s defenses began cracking, they needed her expertise. And when first Wraith started showing up on the streets, the people rallied behind her and she was reinstated to her former position—back by popular demand, so to speak. People trusted her, because she was the only person within the government who told them the truth, and did it early enough to give them a fighting chance.” Alice shrugged and then sighed. “But it didn’t matter. Soon thereafter the Wraith infiltrated Atlantis. She… the other Alice, I mean… she was there at the time, and it was there that she found out who was behind all this.” She paused for a beat, and then continued: “It was Jareth, the Wraith we’d met last year, and who had managed to modify his DNA to be able to influence human and Wraith minds in ways previously unknown—and to be able to use Ancient technology. He had found an abandoned Lantean ship, brought it back to working order, modified its hyperdrive to allow for intergalactic jumps, and started shipping Wraith over to the Milky Way. He was the mastermind of their strategy—to wait and build their numbers before ever showing themselves in our galaxy. He was also the one who built and operated the cloning facility. And, thanks to his mind-bending abilities, he was also the one to get inside Atlantis. A battle ensued… and he almost managed to take over the city. If not for her—the other Alice—he would succeed. But he couldn’t bend her, and, as a last resort, she managed to program a self-destruct that he couldn’t stop in time. She managed to get off the city before it blew up, killing Jareth, a number of his cronies, and a fair amount of our people who had been bent.” Alice sighed. “It was better to destroy Atlantis rather than let it fall into Jareth’s hands, and killing him in the process was a big win, but it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. There were still a hundred Hive ships hung all over the Earth… and they kept hacking away at its defenses, and landing on the surface, all over the planet, feeding, killing, causing panic that was at times worse than the Wraith attacks. That’s when the Lambs of God started gaining a real following. They’d been around for a long while, and when the news of the aliens first came to light, they started preaching that it’s God’s punishment for Earth’s many sins, and that it was their divine right to right these wrongs—by eliminating the perpetrators. What followed was _years_ of strife, as the societies descended further and further into chaos, and governments desperately tried to keep fighting the losing war… everything stopped, you see—no more import or export, power gone or intermittent at best, satellites destroyed or inoperative, communication nearly non-existent. Food was scarce, vital medications were no longer produced, prices in the few shops that still operated were hiked beyond reason… no more space on cemeteries, crematoriums couldn’t keep up with the demand…” She stopped, looked at the President’s horrified face and decided to hold off on the details. “The Pentagon was destroyed early by a volley of kamikaze Darts. Eventually the president at the time decided to evacuate. He, all of his cabinet except the Defense Secretary—meaning the other Alice, of course—and most of the remaining Congress and Senate, which had already been decimated, mostly by the Lambs, went to Colorado, to escape through the Stargate. The plan was to get to the Gamma site, which was uninhabited so far, and hence never on the Wraith’s radar, and rebuild there. Following the government a selection of the best scientists, thinkers, doctors, technicians, and military was to go through. All the rest was to remain on Earth.”

“They chose to save their own necks by sacrificing the entire population of Earth?!” The President rose from the couch with the force of his indignation. He started pacing around, throwing her disbelieving looks. “Just what kind of horrendous monsters were they?”

Alice hid a smile, looking away. Then she sighed. “They didn’t get to enact that plan, if that makes you feel better. The president at the time and his cabinet just made it to the SGC when the Wraith attacked it—they must have known of the plan and were just waiting for a good moment. The federal government was snuffed out within a day. The other Alice told me they didn’t know what exactly happened—just that the Stargate Command’s self-destruct was activated, burying the Gate under tons of molten rock.”

“Serves them right,” the President muttered vengefully, sitting back down. Then he looked at Alice and raised his eyebrows. “That was how your older version became the president, wasn’t it? The presidential line of succession…”

Alice nodded. “She decided to stay on Earth and help, and that’s how she managed to survive. After the SGC blew up, the Congress and Senate essentially dissolved—technically, the Speaker of the House should have succeeded the late president because VP perished also, but he was nowhere to be found—maybe the Lambs got him, or maybe the Wraith, or maybe he was just hiding out—and the same went for the Senate Pro Tem. All the other cabinet members were with the president at the SGC, so it came back to her… the other Alice. They found a judge and she was sworn in. But it was all too little too late. The SGC was gone, they got the Groom Lake and the UN facility where the Chair was as well, and soon Earth had no more spacecraft. They did all they could with the fighters and missiles, but Wraith easily dealt with those. And soon there was nothing more that could be employed against the Wraith. They still tried to protect the remaining population with rifles and guns, and so the struggle continued… it wasn’t as easy to cull the Earth as it had been other planets—we’re far more spread out, and we hide in our homes and shelters, often below ground. The Wraith had to take the fight to the streets, up close and personal… it took years. At some point the other Alice decided to pull all the military forces underground, by which I mean that they took shelter in bunkers such as the one Tom had taken me to. The Wraith attacked less and less, and they figured most of them went into hibernation—only a rear guard stayed, and still sometimes went down to feed or cull. The remainders of the populace were few and far between, and then something happened that decimated them even more.” Alice closed her eyes, anticipating what she had to say next, but it only brought the unwelcome images right into relief, so she opened them and continued, her voice getting hoarse again—both from talking for a long time, and from the pent-up emotion. “The winter before I came the Lambs of God gathered a great number of people, both other Lambs and completely innocent bystanders, and herded them into Washington, D.C. Most people went willingly, convinced that there was some sort of help awaiting, some were held at gunpoint. Thousands of people, from all up and down the East Coast. One day they all gathered around the White House and along the Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to the Capitol… and all drank poison.”

“Why?!” The President’s eyes were wide as he stared at her in shock. “Why would they do that?!”

“They had been planning it for a while. It wasn’t that easy to produce a large amount of poison at that point, so they must have been stockpiling it for a long time... They passed it around in small bottles, promising that it would make anyone who drank it immune to Wraith feeding. Maybe they took inspiration from the Hoffan drug, who knows… The poison wasn’t fast enough to stop those who hadn’t yet taken it—presumably if they had seen the effects, they’d stop… though who knows. People were desperate at this point. They all drank the poison and then waited for their salvation—but what came was only death.” Alice paused for a moment, the memory of the putrid, half-liquefied bodies in various stages of decomposition she had seen from her Jumper that first day haunting her. She took a deep breath, trying to chase it away. “They did similar actions all in the Midwest, the South and on the West Coast, too. There was no more direct communication to warn people that it was a scam, and so they went willingly to their deaths… after that the Lambs weren’t that big of a concern anymore, since so many of them took their own poison. What remained was the world in chaos, small groups of people banding together into a network of civilian outposts or into free ravagers’ companies that I saw when I came.”

The President shook his head. “That is…” But he didn’t finish. At this moment there was a knock on the door and it opened, admitting a blonde woman, just a few years older than Alice. As before, being interrupted felt weird, as if being pulled away from a very engrossing book—it seemed unreal.

“I’m sorry, Mister President, I know you didn’t want to be disturbed but the NSA needs you for just a moment.”

The President sighed and then got up to his feet. “Okay, let him in. Captain, will you give me a moment?”

“Of course, sir.” Alice stood up and left the room through the same door the secretary had entered. She passed the National Security Advisor on the way and then the door to the Oval Office closed.

“You can wait here, ma’am,” the President’s secretary pointed at a chair that stood right next to the door, by her desk. She immediately went back behind it and picked up her work, though Alice couldn’t tell what was it that she was doing.

The captain thanked her quietly and sat down, her cap once again on her lap. She was glad for the interruption. It accorded some time for the President to mull through what she had told him—and allowed her to think back to what the other Alice had told _her_ and what she decided to keep to herself. There were things she didn’t wish to share—things that could actually get her in trouble if she revealed them: about the personal story of the other Alice. The story that had its beginnings in her own past—very recent past…

*

“How did you end up here?” Alice asked at one point in their conversation. “I mean, how did you go from captain in the US Air Force to Defense Secretary?”

The president smiled, and there was a lot warmth in that smile—and an equal amount of sadness, or maybe grief. She stood up and walked past the couch where Alice sat, to one of the dressers standing by the opposite wall. There was nothing on the dresser, but she opened one of the cupboards and pulled something out of it. She handed it to Alice.

It was a photo album; a fancy one, with beautiful dark red leather cover and thick handmade paper sheets. A bit apprehensive, Alice opened it on the first page, not sure what to expect; but the first photograph was very familiar to her. It was the very first picture that was ever made of her: she had just been born, and lay in her mother’s hands, with very curious three-year old Jake at their side.

“It was a gift and the only thing I grabbed from my office when I was leaving it for the last time, years ago,” the president said quietly. “The collection of the most important photos in my life.”

The next page revealed three kids, two eight year old boys and a five year old girl, hanging out in the back yard of the Boyds’ house: Jake, Aaron, and herself. Another one of the whole family, mom, dad, Jake at fourteen and Alice at eleven. High school graduation, Alice looking very small and very young in her gown and cap, next to Jake and Aaron again, on the backdrop of their entire class. College commencement, with Alice in a gown again, Jake in uniform, mom in tears. The day she was commissioned to Second Lieutenant, Aaron, Curt, Ian, Zach and Jeff around her. Her in front of a panel of serious men and women, in full flow of her PhD thesis defense presentation. That was the last photo she recognized. The next one was a surprise: an unknown house, and herself in front of it, Karim standing next to her with his arm around her shoulders, both smiling. She looked up at the president, her eyebrows raised.

“So I… you stayed with him?”

“I did. For thirty-five years. I married him. This was taken in front of his father’s house in London, after I officially ended my contract with the Air Force and became a civilian again. We could finally be open about our relationship.”

“That’s… wow,” Alice said confusedly. So she really did it—she gave up her military career for Karim! She was meaning to do that, of course… but there was a little bit of uncertainty in her, she had to admit, a bit of fear if it was really the right choice. And yet, it turned out, she had made it—and stuck with it. Thirty-five years! “He’s gone?” She asked quietly.

“Yes.” The grief was almost palpable when Alice looked at the president’s face; but her voice still held a lot of warmth mixed in with the sadness. “It was before we went underground. He insisted on leading a team against a big group of Lambs of God that was on a killing spree in Boston. Ironically enough, it wasn’t the Lambs that got them, but the Wraith. No one from his unit came back.”

“I’m sorry,” Alice whispered, looking at the photo, lightly touching Karim’s smiling face—so incongruous to her before they got together months ago—or, was it, now, forty years ago?

“Yeah, me too. He was really my greatest supporter, my everlasting champion. He never let me down, not once.” The president shook her head and then sighed.

Alice turned the page: she was wearing a wedding gown in the next photo, and Karim stood next to her in a tuxedo.

“After leaving the service, I was allowed to stay on Atlantis as a civilian scientist. Of course, I did more than that—I was still part of a team, not the same one as Basil, of course, but we often worked side by side. That is, until about two years after the wedding, when I got pregnant.”

A child! Somehow the news shocked her. Of course it made sense that she would have children—she had not thought of that yet, but she figured one day she would… but to hear about it was so bizarre that her brain was refusing to cooperate. She hastily turned the page to cover up her own confusion. The next photo was a mirror image of the very first one in the album; except in this one, _she_ was the harried but visibly happy mother with a little bundle in her arms, and the older child at the side of the bed was not a boy, but a little red-headed girl.

“My eldest, Leila.” The president pointed at the girl. “And my middle child and only son, Eric, just hours after he was born.”

Eric—of course. Made sense she would name her son after her dad. And Leila was Karim’s mom’s name, only spelled differently. And she said middle—so there was a third one. And the next photo revealed it: the five of them, sitting around a Christmas tree: Karim, looking serene as always but somehow his expression was warmer than she had ever seen on him; herself, already not looking exactly familiar—visibly older, maybe in her late thirties or early forties; the red-headed girl, looking to be about eight; a dark-haired boy, maybe three or four years younger; and a second little girl, a plump toddler with similarly dark hair.

“It was the last Christmas before my mom passed,” the president said sorrowfully. “She took that photo.”

Alice looked down on it, feeling a big lump down her throat at the thought of losing her mom—but she didn’t have enough courage to ask what year it was, or how she died.

“What did you named the youngest one?” She asked instead.

“Samantha, but we called her Sammie.” The president saw Alice’s look and hastened to add: “Carter was alive and well at the time. But I looked up to her so much, I wanted to honor her somehow.”

Alice nodded. She had never thought about it, but these names all made perfect sense to her. She’d choose them herself if… well, in fact, she _did_ choose them. Thinking about it made her head hurt.

“When I first got pregnant with Leila, we both asked to be reassigned to the SGC, me and Basil.” The president said after a moment. “That request was granted and we moved into a real house in Colorado. Jake stayed behind on Atlantis.” She paused again. “He was killed in action a few years later, just a few months after Sammie was born.”

“How…” Alice began, but then stopped, unsure if she wanted to know. The president answered anyway.

“They were on a mission to locate a possible ZPM that we thought was hidden in a small Ancient outpost. They didn’t find it, but instead ran into a group of Wraith worshippers who took them hostage and gifted them to a Wraith queen. They managed to get free, Jake stayed behind to allow his team to escape. That was the last we heard of him.”

Of course he would stay behind. Of course he would. Stupid brave Jake… Alice blinked hard, trying to chase the tears away. She knew it wasn’t her timeline—it hadn’t happened yet, not for her… and yet it did. It was too confusing to think about—the only thing she knew was that it hurt to hear how everyone she loved perished one by one.

Another turn of the page, another photo. A cityscape—a familiar one, too. Los Angeles, seen from above. On the forefront, four kids and two adults playing baseball: Karim, Aaron, Leila, Eric, Sammie and another boy with black hair, but older than the other three. Alice didn’t need to guess who it was—the resemblance was striking.

“That’s Ike, isn’t it?”

The president nodded. “Sixteen here. This was Basil’s retirement party. He never liked big events so instead we organized a little get-together in Aaron’s backyard. Around that time I was asked to head the R&D department at the Groom Lake. Basil was offered to lead the security office at the nearby UN facility that was dubbed Area 53, with 52 being the SGC. He needed to be a civilian for that, though, hence the retirement.”

Alice flipped to the next page. The next photo was quite a leap from the previous one—it showed a twenty-something Leila in a graduation gown and cap, surrounded by the entire family. What was remarkable was the baby bump clearly visible in the photo.

“I wasn’t very pleased at that, as you might imagine,” the president said with a melancholy smile. “She was so young… only twenty-two, just graduated college, and already pregnant! But she was heads over heels for that boyfriend of hers, and she married him that year, soon after she had given birth to my first grandchild. I was fifty-five and already a grandmother!” She shook her head. “A few years before that I had been appointed to the Defense Science Board—sort of a side-gig, if you will, but it got me inside the Washington circles a lot more. I only served on the Board for a year; after that I was asked to join the Department of Defense as a special advisor to the Secretary on the matters of Homeworld Security. That’s when I managed to make a successful push for the construction of this place—Uncle Alastar, at that time a senior member of the Senate, helped greatly, I have to say.” The president waved her hand to indicate the facility around them.

But Alice was still looking at the photo. Right next to the very pregnant red-headed girl stood a dark-haired boy, just a few years younger—but old enough to give Alice a headache, trying to figure out if it was possible that he looked so familiar only because he resembled his father. And then, all of a sudden, it clicked. She looked up at the president with wide-open eyes.

“You call him Ricky,” she blurted out, completely taken aback. “Your son—you call him Ricky. He’s the man I saw—in the room, before, you said _Ricky, can you ask the science department to start preparing_. And he replied—he said _yeah, sure, ma’am._ Except it wasn’t _ma’am_ , as in Madam President. It was _mom,_ as in mother! That’s why he looked so familiar to me!”

The president raised her eyebrows. “Excellent deduction,” she mocked, but then added, sadness again audible in her voice: “Yes, that was Eric, my son. My only remaining child.”

That statement was like a club, hitting Alice in the stomach and blowing all wind out of her. She looked at the older woman for a moment, grappling with the enormity of what she had just said. She couldn’t find any words.

“Leila and her husband, Daniel, and their daughter Holly, they moved to New York. Daniel was a stock broker and Leila took after her grandma—she was a graphic artist. After the Wraith showed up over the Earth, I begged them to move somewhere where there would be a better shelter—but they wouldn’t… Leila never did anything she didn’t want to, she was really headstrong, that girl… and so they were still there when communication went out. I don’t know what happened to them after that but they’re not in New York anymore.”

“But there’s a chance that they’re alive somewhere…” Alice said plaintively, more to convince herself that all was not hopeless than anything else.

The president’s answering smile broke her heart. “Maybe,” she allowed, but it was clear that she didn’t believe it herself. “I do know what happened to Sammie, though. She lived in L.A. before it all started for real. I bent the rules and made her take shelter at the SGC. She was there when it exploded.”

Alice looked back down at the photo—it was too much looking into the eyes of this woman—this woman who lost almost everything and everyone she loved.

“I managed to convince Eric to stay with us, and that’s the only reason he’s still alive. I wasn’t able to protect anyone else—not family nor friends… I don’t know what happened to them. I doubt anyone is still alive—but even if they are… what kind of life it really is?”

Her voice quivered and broke at the end—and, when Alice looked up at her, for the first time she saw an actual tear drop from her eye. But the president quickly wiped it away and took a deep breath.

“At any rate, that is the story. You wanted to know.”

“Yeah,” Alice sighed. “I’m kinda sorry I asked now… so much tragedy…”

But the president was shaking her head. “No, that’s not what you should take away from it. Don’t get me wrong, all of it is… hard… but I don’t regret a thing. I had a wonderful life, full of love and laughter. I had the most supportive husband ever, I had the most amazing kids, great friends, I got to work on some of the most fascinating stuff and make a real impact. No, I don’t regret anything. And even knowing the price to pay—I’d do it again.”

Alice knew in an instant what she was talking about—that one single moment in their common past when she had come against a choice that determined the course of events for the next forty years—that moment in a Jumper when she could sacrifice Karim to kill Jareth, and she didn’t. If Jareth died then, none of it would’ve happened— _he_ was behind all of it, _he_ brought the Wraith over to the Milky Way, _he_ masterminded their plan that saw the entire galaxy fall before they even looked towards the Earth, _he_ was responsible for the invasion. What the other Alice was saying was that the billions of lives lost because of Jareth were not worth her one lifetime with Karim. Even if that meant losing him in the end. 


	5. Chapter 4

She didn’t hear when the door opened, so the NSA walking by startled her. The President’s secretary smiled at her and gestured at the entrance.

“You can go back in, now, ma’am.”

“Thank you.” Alice rose from her chair, shaking her head to chase away the wistful, forlorn feeling that the recollections had brought.

The President was sitting behind his desk, writing something down. He finished with a sweeping signature at the bottom of the page and then stood up.

“Sorry about that, Captain. The business of the nation keeps rolling.” He gave her a whimsical smile and gestured at her to take a seat. “Give me just a minute,” he added and walked past her, outside, to his secretary’s office. Alice saw him hand her the piece of paper and they exchanged a few words very quietly. Then he came back, saw that she was still standing, gave her an exasperated look and finally sank onto a couch.

Alice sat down as well. “I hope everything is alright, sir.”

“Perfectly fine.” He shrugged it off, though Alice knew that a personal visit of the National Security Advisor during a scheduled meeting must have meant there was _something_ cooking. “Now, where were we?”

“I relayed to you what I learned from the other Alice about the events leading up to my entering that timeline.”

“Ah, yes. So you did. Quite horrifying, this whole story, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” _And you don’t know half of it._

“Alright, so you talked. And what happened next?”

“Someone came in and interrupted us and she had to go deal with something. She gave me permission to wander about, though she asked to keep away from the barracks—the part of the facility where the bulk of the military was housed. Seeing me might not be good for the morale, she thought—most people would probably not recognize her in me, but there might have been some that have seen her photos from the past and make a connection. I ended up finding my way to the officers’ commissary, and then to a little room they gave me as my temporary quarters. That first night… was difficult.” Alice looked away, trying to hide just how hard it had been—all the emotions she had managed to hold at bay until then, suddenly made bare in the darkness—sadness and grief for loss that was not hers but which hurt as if it had been; despair and hopelessness of her bleak situation; and the utter confusion at finding herself confronted with a lifetime of choices she had not yet made—and yet which, apparently, she _would have_ made if not for this freak accident that led her there…

The memory was so strong that it winded her. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing: in and out… in and out… She could hear her own heart throbbing in her ears—the ticking of the clock—the rustling of the wind from behind the thick bulletproof windows.

Her heart and breathing a little calmer, she opened her eyes and swallowed, before continuing. “The next morning, after breakfast, I found my way back to the operation room I had seen the day before. I didn’t want to disturb the people who worked there, so I just stood to the side and tried to figure out what exactly they were doing. Before I could, though, the other Alice came in, saw me and approached…”

*

“I’m sorry I had to cut our talk short yesterday,” the president told her, gesturing for Alice to follow her. “I hope you got some rest.”

Alice considered lying for a second, but then decided on the truth. “Not really. It was all kinda… a lot to take in.”

“I don’t doubt.” The president ushered her through a door into another room, adjacent to the operations center. It was just as sparsely decorated, but it featured a big conference table in the middle and more screens all around on the walls. A few people were sat there already. They all stood as the two Alices walked in.

“Gentlemen, this is _Captain_ Alice Boyd,” the president made the presentation, and judging by their expressions, they were already in the know on what was going on—none of them looked particularly stricken, though Alice noted a slew of curious and measuring glances thrown towards her.

The president took a seat at the top of the table and gestured to Alice to sit down next to her. She felt a bit uncomfortable being stared at by the entire group, though she had to admit if the roles were reversed, she would also be very interested to inspect the differences between the president and her younger version, come from the past.

“Alright, let’s go around the table, Ricky, will you start?” The president addressed the young civilian Alice had seen the previous day. She already knew who he was and seeing him now made her feel very odd indeed.

“Yeah… I’m Eric Boyd and apparently I am your son, or will be, or could be anyway,” he said with a curved-lip smile that was so reminiscent of Karim’s that it made Alice’s heart pound for a moment. It didn’t slip her attention, too, that he kept his mother’s name—hers—and not his father’s. “I’m basically an errand boy here, the president’s gofer—“

“Ricky,” his mother chastised him in a tone in which exasperation and censure were mixed with incredible warmth. “He serves as my administrative assistant .”

Eric gave Alice another smile and a playful eye-roll but didn’t say anything else. The president waved at the person sitting next to him to continue the presentations.

“I am Patrick Spencer, the president’s chief of staff.” The man was maybe a decade younger than the other Alice, with a receded hairline and thin, wrinkled face. He was the only person wearing a full black suit and a tie.

Next in line was a woman in her forties with beautiful chocolate brown hair pinned into a stylish ‘do. “Katherine Smith, National Security Advisor.” She gave Alice a serious little bow.

“Paul Amos, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” An older man, a navy admiral with an impressive rack of ribbons on his chest, nodded to her, too.

“Torrence Maclean, I deal with what little intelligence we can get these days.” A bald man in his fifties cracked a woeful smile at her.

“Jessica Lance, I am in charge of the science division of this operation.” The last person, sitting on Alice’s left, was a woman with light blonde hair and beautiful, large, blue eyes hidden behind thick glasses.

“Thank you, everyone.” The president nodded and waved at the center of the table, where a number of rolled-up papers and binders lay. Alice recognized the set she and Tom had brought from the Pentagon. “So, did we find anything useful in that pile?”

“No,” the chief of staff said grumpily.

“Not immediately useful, no,” the blonde woman echoed after him. “As expected, all of the research here is unfinished, partial, or proven incorrect since its conception. We need to identify one or two areas on which my people can focus, but even if we direct all of our resources to work on it, it’s doubtful if we’ll find anything useful fast.”

“So it’s just a matter of time, not ability?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asked dubiously.

“In science everything is a matter of time,” the president answered with a slight smile. “What’s your recommendation, Jess? What should we focus on?”

“Obviously the prime candidate is the zero-point energy generation, that offers us the highest possible reward,” the science department coordinator replied thoughtfully. “But it has very high complexity factor and therefore might cost us a lot of resources and even more time. Less complex but perhaps equally useful would be the production of Ancient drones, but it poses its own challenges: how do we launch and steer them without a Chair? We could potentially power them with the naquadah generators we’ve got here, but they won’t serve us unless we can also find a way to point them at what we want them to hit. There’s also research that could potentially bring us out of phase, Atlantis-grade shielding technology, and cloaking, but none of them would help us on a large scale unless we find a better power source. There are other projects there, too, smaller ones that do not seem to have any strategic or tactical value for us at this moment—FTL speed research, beaming technology, nanite therapies, and suchlike.”

The president nodded silently for a moment, and everyone looked at her expectantly. Alice felt very odd being included in this discussion. Why was she even there? It’s not like they had much use for a lowly captain at this meeting, even if that captain was a younger version of their commander-in-chief…

“Well, we did just get this unbelievable stroke of luck in the form of a functioning Jumper—or at least we hope we can fix it,” the president finally said, throwing Alice a measured look. “There still should be some drones in the Jumper. We should start thinking about what would be the best way to use it.”

Alice frowned. So that was why she was there. The president wanted to use _her_ Jumper—essentially commandeer it from her. Something in Alice rebelled at the idea, but at the same time—what difference did it make? She had no way to go home, and hard as she might try to find one, there was no guarantee she could—but the Jumper might actually prove to be useful to the war effort.

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” The national security advisor shrugged. “We take the Jumper, cloak it, get it close to the Hives in our orbit, and fire all the drones to get rid of as many ships as we can!”

“And what kind of tactics is that?” The Chairman’s voice rose an octave in indignation. “We take out a couple of Hives and then what? You think the Wraith just gonna look on and let us do it? We’d just lose the Jumper for very little reward…”

“Well, what’s your brilliant idea then, huh?”

“Well, for starters we can use the Jumper for reconnaissance, see what we’re really up against, make contact with whoever is still left standing in the other corners of this world…”

“To what end?” Katherine Smith shook her head. “No, Admiral, one Jumper gives us nothing. We might as well just go out guns blazing, t’would do us as much as good as anything…”

“You think you’re so bold, Doctor Smith, but what you are is defeatist. You think we’ve already lost!”

“No, Admiral, I just live in the real world where no army will help us against life-sucking aliens on _ships!_ ”

“Well I don’t think it’s smart to sacrifice our only real advantage for a stunt that will bring us no tactical _or_ strategic benefits!”

“That’s ‘cause you’re a sissy!” The national security advisor said heatedly. “Admiral sissy-mary!”

“Okay, that’s enough you two!” The chief of staff interjected. Alice thought it was high time—she had never imagined that people of such rank and stature could get into an almost-shouting match like that, and in front of the president to boot. But, she figured, situation was so stressful that maybe everybody’s tempers were always just under the boiling point… and, she realized, the president didn’t look put off—in fact she seemed to enjoy seeing her people debate things so fiercely.

“I don’t think these ideas are necessarily mutually exclusive,” the other Alice said with a small smile playing on her lips. “We can do reconnaissance and whatnot and once that’s done, we can go on and shoot as many Hives as possible… though I have to agree with the admiral, that may not be the best use of the Jumper. At any rate, let’s not count our chickens before they hatch. We still have to get that Jumper from Baltimore. How are we on preparedness?”

“We have gathered all spare parts that could help, based on the captain’s description of the damage.” Jessica Lance nodded towards Alice. “We have a couple volunteers for the mission, too, but nobody with the ATA gene.”

“That’s not an issue,” Eric added hastily. “I’ll go with them. I’ve always wanted to fly one of these things.”

Alice caught a look that the president threw her son—a mixture of pride and concern flitting through her face, the momentary fear plain as day.

“No, I’ll go,” the captain blurted out, surprising everyone—it was the first time she spoke since the beginning of the meeting. “It’s my Jumper anyway. And that way you can leave your scientists here to focus on other things, with the right spare parts I can fix the Jumper myself, no problem.”

“It’s a six week long hike,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs cautioned. “Quite dangerous.”

“I know, I’ve just done it.” She shrugged. “But you have to admit, it makes more sense to send just one person, instead of three. I can fix the Jumper and fly it back here.”

The president cocked her head and raised her eyebrows.

“Are you sure? You don’t need to do it. You deserve a break.”

Alice smirked. “Would you take a break?”

The president opened her mouth, then closed it and chuckled. “Touché. Okay, you’ll go. But not alone—we’ll give you an escort. And you should really rest a bit—at least a couple days.”

Alice smiled and nodded acquiescence. She remained silent for the rest of the meeting. The little group which, she figured, functioned as the president’s security council, discussed a number of things—sporadic reports of the Lambs’ attacks, the watchful silence on the part of the Wraith, some unconfirmed rumors of Canadian troops moving through what used to be North Dakota, skirmishes between ravagers and some civilian outposts, an infectious disease outbreak in one of the smaller military stations. Nothing concrete, nothing they could do anything about, no plans to act—everything seemed dreary and disheartening. The cool, composed attitude the group displayed towards all this news—if you could call it that—suggested that this was a daily routine; and that this hopeless powerlessness was nothing new to them.

“You didn’t need to do it, you know, I’d have gone,” Eric said to Alice quietly in the momentary tumult after the meeting was adjourned.

“I know.” She nodded and looked over his shoulder at his mother, who was having a quick word with her Chief of Staff. “But I’m the odd one here. I don’t belong, so I’m expendable.” She turned her gaze back onto him. “You’re not. Not to her.” And she moved her head towards the president.

Eric looked around at her, then back to Alice and sighed. “Well, there’s no question to it—you really are her.”

He then nodded goodbye and left her a little puzzled at how what she said related to it—but didn’t have much time to mull through it as the president herself walked up to her soon enough.

“Thank you.” She smiled at her younger version with a lovely, sad, heartbreaking smile that betrayed the weight of emotion behind these simple words.

Alice replied with a tentative smile of her own and nodded, acknowledging the debt of gratitude.

“You really should get some rest—and some more food. I don’t know if I ever saw myself be that thin since getting out of Jareth’s dungeon.” The president shook her head in dismay.

“I don’t want to rest—or, at least, I don’t want to be idle,” Alice replied, shrugging. “I didn’t _love_ the hike up here, but I’d much rather get back on the road immediately than waste time idling by.”

The other Alice chuckled. “That sounds very familiar. You can go the day after tomorrow. We’ll need that time to get your escort and some gear prepared for you, anyway. And if you’re wanting for something to do…” She threw a look at the table, where the papers and binders still lay. “You can give these a read. I’m curious to hear your opinion on what would be the best starting point for our science team to research.” She laughed, seeing the instant enthusiasm in Alice’s face. “Just make sure you find time to eat and sleep in the meantime… And please don’t bring any of those outside of this room.”

Alice nodded assent. The president smiled again, said goodbye and left the room. Now alone, Alice immediately sat back down at the table to go over the gathered materials.

It took her stomach grumbling so loud that it almost drowned the muffled sound of voices from the adjacent operations center for her to remember the time. With a pang of regret, she left the fascinating read on the table and ventured out of the room to find the commissary again. She returned after lunch, and then the next morning—spent almost the entire day locked inside, studying the research. Doctor Lance was right about it—the most useful things were also the hardest to discover. The lowest hanging fruit were the things they had already begun to unravel in Alice’s own timeline—things like beaming technology or nanite therapies, both of which Alice herself studied on Atlantis. But there was no practical application for either of those in the current situation—unless…

She stood up quite suddenly, causing the papers to spill onto the floor. She put them feverishly back onto the table and nearly ran out of the room and into the operations center. Each time she had passed it in the course of the previous two days, she tried to be quiet and stealthy, so as to not disturb the people working there—but now she marched straight to the man who looked to be in charge of the room and addressed him quite sharply.

“I need to speak to the president at once, where is she?”

The man—a Navy commander, judging by his uniform and epaulettes—looked up at her from his computer, and an expression of annoyance quickly made room for surprise and deference. By now, everyone who worked in this part of the underground complex has heard about the strange visitor from the past, and knew about her connection to their beloved president.

“I’ll try to get her for you, ma’am,” he replied politely, even though he technically outranked her, and turned away to use his radio.

The president appeared in the center ten minutes later. As Alice ran up to her and opened her mouth, she shook her head and nodded towards the conference room. Only after the door closed behind them, she turned to Alice with an expectant expression on her weathered face.

“You shouldn’t use your resources to try and find a way to create a ZPM,” she blurted out, breathless with excitement. “There’s something else you can do—something well within our reach, just as soon as we get the Jumper back!”

The president’s eyebrows furrowed. “You have my attention.”

“You could spend years trying to discover how to create a ZPM and never find it,” Alice said, a little more calmly. “And those other things that Doctor Lance mentioned—Ancient drones, shields, out-of-phase generator—in order for them to work for the entire planet you’d need waaaay too much power, you can’t generate it without access to ZPM. You can’t take those Hive ships out from here, and you don’t have any ships of your own. Except the Jumper. It doesn’t give you any advantages—bar one. It can help you put something on the orbit!”

“On the orbit?” The president’s eyebrows ran up. “And what would that be?”

“A satellite,” Alice replied with an air of big reveal. “But not just any satellite—one that comes equipped with a beaming generator. Then you could not only beam your people from one place to another at least within our continent within seconds—but you could beam your troops directly _inside_ the Wraith Hive ships—you said it yourself, they’re probably mostly in hibernation by now, most of them anyway, so you could take over these ships and then use _them_ against any remaining ones…”

But the president was shaking her head. “No, we can’t beam anything inside these ships—they can jam our beaming frequency…”

“Yes, but you can change that!” Alice walked up to the table and shuffled the papers until she found the one she wanted. “Look at this research—it’s about interfacing with Wraith systems, it’s Doctor McKay’s early work—but look also here…” She handed the president another binder, opened at a specific page. “It says here that when the Hive ships are travelling in a pack, they connect to each other and run correlative updates—basically they make sure that they all operate on the same basic software, to take advantage of any advancements one of them might have made…”

“So if we can get into one of those Hives, sabotage the jamming and then trigger the update—it would make _all_ the ships on our orbit vulnerable to the beaming technology…” The president’s eyes grew large as she looked at the papers in her hands.

“And then you can beam nukes aboard and get rid of them—but that doesn’t guarantee a victory, because there might be more ships further away from Earth which will _not_ get updated—they need to be relatively close to each other for it to work, according to this…”

“But we have this research on interfacing with Wraith systems… if we manage to take over these ships, we can turn them against any other Hives in our solar system—get ourselves free of them…”

“There’s probably more of them out there in the galaxy,” Alice cautioned. “And when you take the first shot, they’re all gonna wake up—the same way they woke up when we first came to Atlantis… but it’s a start. A chance to do _something_.”

“There’s a hundred things that might go wrong with this plan.” The president looked at her, and her eyes were bright and for the first time since she met her, Alice thought she didn’t see despair in them. “But you’re right—this might be our chance. Maybe our only chance…” She sighed. “Why did _I_ not see this myself?”

“You didn’t read the research,” Alice reminded her. “And who knows maybe your people would’ve come up with it—or maybe you just needed an outside look at it…”

The other Alice smiled crookedly. “You know, for your own sake I’m sorry you’re stuck here—but I can’t deny that it’s an impossible stroke of luck to have you here… Not only do you bring a Jumper into the equation—you also give me the first viable plan to strike back at the Wraith since Atlantis was destroyed.”

The captain shrugged and then smiled. “I may be an outsider, but I’m in this reality now, too—might as well do what I can to help…”

“Alright.” The president put the papers down on the table. “New plan: you go get us that Jumper and in the meantime we figure out how to build that satellite, cloak it, reprogram the Wraith’s jamming device, and trigger an update.”

“Sounds good.” Alice nodded.

“Let’s get moving.”

*

“The next morning I met my escort: three Marines and Tom. He had volunteered to come back with me—I guess he finally decided to trust me, now that he knew I hadn’t lied to him. This time we were much better equipped, though—we had tents, sleeping bags, cold weather gear, some food stores that could last us a long time, a bit of meds for exchange with the civilians, and other useful stuff. Of course we had to carry it all on our backs, but even so we made much better time than the first time around. Possessing all the gear was nearly balanced out by the deteriorating weather; only a couple days after we set out, it started snowing. It got a better, bit by bit, as we continued to walk south, so that the farther we got, the less we needed the cold weather gear and everything. We reached our goal after fifty-four days, on the New Year’s Eve, two thousand and fifty-two.”

“That sounds preposterous,” the President shook his head as Alice took a beat to take a sip of water. “Completely implausible. And horrifying.”

“You wanted to know all the details,” Alice reminded him, putting the glass cautiously back onto the table. Her hands were trembling a little from all the emotions. “I’d be happy to give you just the highlights…”

“Oh, no,” he protested immediately. “It’s horrifying—but also fascinating. I want to know everything. I wish you could tell me everything day by day—I bet those fifty-four days were full of adventures, too.”

Alice smiled indulgently and then shook her head. “Less so than the first time around. There were more of us, so the ravagers left us alone—and it was harder to get to the civilians, too, even with my life signs detector in use. They hid from a big, armed group, and I can’t really blame them. Days blended together, wake up, eat some breakfast, clear the camp, start walking, take a break, hunt, refill water, walk some more, eat something, walk again, put up the camp, eat, go to sleep… No, the most interesting part was the fact that Tom was more forthcoming than before, and the Marines had no problem spilling the beans on whatever subject I breached either. They spoke of many things… their lives before the _new reality_ , as they continued to call it… what they lost, families and loved ones… and more trivial stuff: how they missed their favorite restaurants, and football season, and the twinkle of Christmas lights… They told me a bit of history, too—mostly silly things, like who won Super Bowl in what year, and which actor got an Oscar, and what company was first to release a fully self-driving car, that kind of stuff… They were all younger than—I mean, only one of them was even born when I left my timeline… their childhood was all in my future.” She shook her head again. “It was very interesting to listen to—and it made the long days seem a little shorter.”

“That’s some interesting knowledge to have about the future,” the President noted.

Alice smiled a little ruefully. She remained silent on the biggest things she learned during those long weeks of trekking across the country—of wars that haven’t happened here yet, and diseases not yet encountered, and atrocities not yet committed. There was a chance none of those would happen, of course—but some of them would, and that knowledge itself weighed heavily on her.

“Finally, we made it to the Jumper,” she continued after a moment of silence, letting the President’s remark go without comment. “Despite how far South we’d traveled, it was pretty cold—low thirties, but there was no snow, at least. The Jumper was still there, with just a few dried leaves, broken sticks, and a fair amount of dust pinpointing its position as surely as if it had been uncloaked. I got to work immediately—with the spare crystals, it was very easy to fix it. We still didn’t have a front window, as we couldn’t exactly bring it with us, but we’d be flying inside the atmosphere, so it wasn’t that necessary. It did mean that we had to maintain a fairly low velocity and altitude, so it took us something like fourteen hours to get from Maryland to Minnesota. Even so, I was very windswept when we finally landed inside the facility there—they had a retracting roof that admitted us as we radioed in. I made Tom and the Marines sit in the back, with the bulkhead door closed, so I was the only one exposed to the high winds. Which is to say—as we stepped out of the Jumper, my face was very red, my ears were tearing up, and every hair on my head was pointing in different direction. The other Alice was there, waiting on the platform, and she made a joke about it, but I could immediately see there was something wrong—it was in her face… _my_ face.”

*

“What’s wrong?” Alice asked, running her hands through her hair in a hopeless attempt to get it under control.

The president looked at Tom and the Marines, standing behind Alice, and addressed them first.

“Good job, gentlemen. You may take your leave now. Rest up and then report to your respective COs.”

Alice heard the clicking of their boots as they stood at attention and then walked away. Only then the president turned to her.

“You have a great timing,” she told her darkly. “We were worried you’d been lost on the way.”

“Well, it was a long way to go on foot,” Alice replied anxiously. “What’s going on?”

The president’s lips pressed together into a thin line, and she remained silent for a moment. “You should get some rest, too. I bet you’re hungry and tired after all this.”

“I’ll live. Don’t change the subject, I know you better than anyone,” Alice snapped, her patience suddenly gone. _Fuck, I_ am _tired_. “Tell me!”

The president didn’t get offended. She chuckled, and then shook her head, growing sober again. “I managed to forget how weird it was to talk to you during those two months,” she mumbled. “But you’re right, I’m sorry,” she added louder. “I guess you’re the one person I can level with. We have been found out. It’s just a matter of time before the Wraith come to get us.”

Alice felt deflated. It was worse than she had feared. “How did they find this place?”

“We’re running short on food.” The president shrugged. “We had to send out parties to hunt in the forest. One of them was taken by the Wraith. They will be broken and they will tell the Wraith where to find us, it’s just a matter of time,” she repeated, and the finality in her tone made Alice shiver.

“Okay, so what now?” She asked quickly, unwilling to face the consequences of the news for herself yet.

“We have a number of contingency plans,” the president allowed. “But our best chance is to take the fight to them, just as we planned.”

Alice nodded, noting that a number of people entered the hangar bay where the Jumper was now parked. They set off to work quickly—installing new front window, she saw, but also doing something inside.

“So you managed to build the satellite?”

“And give it a permanent cloak. It won’t work forever—the power source is just a Naquadah reactor—but it will give us more than enough time to do what needs to be done. My people are going to fix up the Jumper—make sure that the new spaceshield will withstand normal operations—and then, basically, we can begin with the execution of the plan. We have a team ready and standing by.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully, hesitating for just a second. “I’ll go, too.”

The president cocked her head to the side, looking at her with an odd mixture of amusement and sadness in her brightly green eyes. “You don’t have to.”

“I know. But you and I both know I’m the best candidate for the job. And it’s my plan, so it’s only fair to put my own butt on the line.”

“Your butt is on the line whether you’re here or there. All our butts are on the line,” the president reminded her with a ghost of a smile. “We have some good people here, too. They can accomplish the mission.”

“Yeah? How many of them can fly the Jumper, hack the Wraith systems, and eliminate encountered hostiles themselves?” Alice shook her head. “We need a small team, and I can do the job of three people on my own.”

“Then maybe I should go. It is my world, after all, and my timeline.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Alice let out a nervous little chuckle. “No offense, but you’re—“

“What? You think I’m too old!” The president looked indignant at the suggestion.

“I _was_ gonna say you’re needed here, but that too.” Alice smirked, and then grew serious again. “Look, you’re me, I get it, you can do whatever I can, and probably more. But will you stake the fate of the Earth on your reflexes?”

The president didn’t reply, but looked over Alice’s shoulder at the engineers working on the Jumper. Then she sighed.

“I wasn’t _seriously_ considering it,” she admitted. “Though I wish I could—it’s difficult as it is to send men into battle, but this…” Her eyes flicked back to Alice’s face. “Alright. You’ll go. But you _do_ need a bit of rest before then.”

“You may not have much time.”

“The Jumper won’t be ready for a few hours. You can at least eat something and get a little shut-eye.”

Alice nodded acquiescence. “A shower would be nice, too.”

“We’ll come get you when we’re ready.”

*

“I got a few hours of sleep before someone shook me awake and brought me out to the platform with the Jumper, where the other Alice was already waiting. In the time that I was resting, the engineering team not only managed to replace the front window pane, but also attach a clamp system to the top of the craft. As I stood there, I watched them fix a satellite the size of a grand piano to it. That’s also when I met my team: two Marines, two Army Rangers, and two Spec Ops airmen. All were experienced NCOs, the best people they had, the other Alice informed me, and all six volunteered for the mission. I told her that, when the satellite was up, she could beam her troops somewhere else to protect them from the imminent attack, but she said there was nowhere they could run. None of the other underground bases could accommodate that many people. Food was scarce, other resources as well… And so, she said, if we failed, there was really nothing else to do but take the last stand and die with honor.”

“No pressure, then,” the President quipped, but his voice remained serious.

Alice laughed nervously, remembering how hard her heart beat as she waited for the Jumper to be ready. “I was never much of a fan of the honorable death scenario. We must not fail, then, I said for the benefit of my new team, though inside I was a trembling mess. Infiltrating a Wraith Hive ship wasn’t a novelty to me—I’d done it plenty of times while on Atlantis. But never before the survival of the planet—or what was left of it—relied on the success of my mission…” She paused for a moment, took a sip of water, and then continued: “Ten minutes later, the craft was ready. The other Alice wished us luck and we crowded into the Jumper and soon we were leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. Just as we did, our sensors picked up three Hive ships hung over the continent, with more spread over the entire planet. They were huge—much bigger than the ships we’d had to deal with in the Pegasus—but they seemed quiet and dormant, looming in the distance on the geosynchronous orbit. I engaged the satellite’s cloak and released the clamps, and it floated away into space gently and gracefully…”

*

“Flight, this is Freedom-1. The satellite is cloaked and away,” Alice said through the communication system. “Request permission to proceed to the second objective.”

“Freedom-1, we have the satellite, it looks fine from here and working as planned,” a male voice from the operations center replied. “You have a go for the second objective.”

“Ready, boys?” Alice asked the men sitting in the aft compartment. Six voices piped up—“Yes, ma’am!”—and she smiled, hearing the pride and conviction in them.

They were near one of the Hive ships now. Alice activated the IFF spoofer and for a few seconds waited with bated breath—they weren’t sure if it would still work, the Wraith of this timeline might have found a way to counteract it. Then the side door to the Dart bay began opening and Alice exhaled with relief.

“Flight, the spoofer worked and we’re going in,” she announced.

“Understood, Freedom-1. Good luck.”

“Freedom-1, out.” She turned off the communications array—it emitted slight energy that could be picked up by the Wraith if they knew what to look for. And they knew that Earth had a Jumper in play—after all, they had seen it when Alice first came through the Stargate into this timeline, so if at any point they became aware of Alice’s team’s presence, she didn’t want to make it easier for them to find the cloaked Jumper.

They flew into the Dart bay. Alice felt her eyebrows arch up as she looked around—the bay was twice the size of what she had normally seen on a Hive ship, and it was packed to the brim with Darts, so much so that she had trouble finding a clear place to land. Finally she managed to set the Jumper down, a little farther away from the entrance than she’d like, but there was no other option. She picked up her gear from the aft and the seven of them moved out at a run, slaloming around parked Darts. At the door, Alice took out her life signs detector and checked the area around them before they went through. Then she took point and led them through the maze of corridors at a slow and cautious pace.

Slipping through the ship quietly like ghosts, they saw no one, not one blip on the hand-held sensor. They didn’t try any doors leading into separate chambers along the way—the only two places, Alice knew, where they could interface with the right systems to achieve the mission objective, was the main control room or the bridge. Both were bound to be guarded, even if most of the Wraith were hibernating.

Of more pressing concern, however, was the fact that Alice had no clue where to find them. Each Hive ship was different, and this one was twice the size of a normal one, to boot. She could download the schematics from any control panel on the way, but that very well could alert the Wraith to their presence, so it had been decided not to try. As long as the Wraith were unaware of the intruders, they would continue to sleep, allowing Alice and her team to move through the ship freely with the life signs detector.

Finally, they reached a corridor that looked different, and after one glance Alice knew why—cocoons lined its walls, a seemingly endless rows of them, each occupied by someone from the planet beneath them—or so Alice assumed. Trying not to look in, and not make automatic calculations in her head—how many cocoons were normally on a Hive ship, how many would be on one this big, and how many of these were around Earth—she continued to move ahead, when suddenly small dot appeared on the life signs detector. She raised her closed fist into the air and the six men behind her came to a halt, their rifles instantly up. The dot was only a few yards ahead of them, they should have seen whoever it was—but then Alice noted a small red triangle pointing down next to the dot.

“It’s on the lower level,” she whispered to her team and gestured for them to move along. They only went a few paces when another dot appeared next to the first one—and then another and another, a little farther away. Alice continued to walk, keeping an eye on the screen as it began flashing up with more and more life signs. All were beneath them, but their number was very concerning to her. Clearly, the Wraith were waking up from their hibernation, there was no other explanation as to why they would just appear on the detector out of thin air. But why now, and why so many at once? It couldn’t be a coincidence. It seemed that they’d been detected.

It was getting difficult keeping track of all the life signs. They all began moving now, but Alice couldn’t see any pattern yet. Then, suddenly, she realized a few of the dots no longer had the red triangles accompanying them—they were on their level, coming up from behind.

“Quickly!” She hissed to her team and broke into a run. She heard their heavy footsteps behind her as they put some distance between them and the Wraith following them. The corridor with the cocoons was long and winding, and there were no doors alongside, but after a few hundred yards, Alice slowed down and checked the detector. The dots she had seen appeared to have stopped; and, as she watched, a few new ones appeared right next to them—for just a moment, they stayed near, and then faded into blackness. With a hint of horror, Alice realized that the Wraith didn’t come after them—they came up to the cocoons to feed. When they removed someone from the cocoon, the detector registered the life sign, only for it to be extinguished when the Wraith had done away with the poor victim… Feeling nauseated, she told herself there was nothing she could do for these people—her mission was too important. Still, it was difficult.

They finally got to an intersection. Alice first checked the area with the detector—there were still plenty of life signs around, but all of them below, bar the few they’d left behind. Then she looked around her, trying to decide which way to go to, and as she moved her head, she caught something out of the corner of her eye—a brightness unexpected in such a dark, eerie place. She did a double-take, but there was nothing—just an empty corridor. And yet for a second she was sure she saw a silhouette there. She looked down at the screen to confirm—no life signs in the area. Puzzled, she wondered if she was stressed enough that she was seeing things—but, she noted, her heart was beating quick but steady, and she felt perfectly normal. She looked around again at the other two corridors, and then, in a snap decision, she turned towards the one where she had seen the luminous silhouette.

They continued their trek through the ship at a brisk pace. Alice was still monitoring all the life signs on her detector, but soon she noted they were moving away, disappearing at the edge of the screen as they went out of range. A pattern began to emerge—dots would appear on a level below, move upwards to feed, and then walk away towards the side of the ship, almost retracing Alice and her team’s steps… and then it hit her. They didn’t detect their presence—they were going towards the Dart bay. And there was only one reason why they would.

“They’re going after the bunker,” she murmured to herself, so low that even her companions couldn’t hear. The captured team must have finally broken and told the Wraith where to find the remnants of the US military. They were preparing for an attack. “We have to hurry!” And she picked up the pace again.

They came to another intersection and this time Alice didn’t even have to move her head—the silhouette was there, white and glowing with an inner light that was so bright it blinded her. She had to blink, and as she did—the phantom disappeared. She turned to her men.

“Did you see anything in there?” She gestured towards the corridor.

They exchanged surprised looks. “No, ma’am.”

 _Am I going crazy?_ She wondered. _Is this an ignis fatuus? Is it leading me astray?_

It was ridiculous. There was no such thing. But she _was_ seeing _something_ … and, at the back of her head, a theory was already forming.

“Let’s move on,” she said and led them into the corridor where she had seen the mirage. As they walked on, they left behind most of the life signs that had been moving away from them in the last five minutes—but then, quite suddenly, a few new ones appeared at the edge of the screen, ahead of them and up one level. A few more yards revealed a pattern to their unmoving presence—they were standing in two groups of three, at what Alice assumed were ingress points either to the bridge or the control room—she suspected the latter.

“I think we found something,” Alice breathed to her team and gestured at them to come closer and look at the detector. “We need to get up a level. We’ll split up in two teams. Sergeant Knowles, you’ll take one around here and at my signal, get rid of this group.” She jabbed her finger on the screen. “Meanwhile, I’ll take the other team and we’ll breach in here. Hopefully, the rest of them will go after you and we’ll be able to flank them.”

“You’re assuming there’s more of them on the other side,” Sergeant Knowles replied cautiously, tracing a circle in the air with his finger.

“We’ll know before we get too close, they should appear on the detector. If there’s more than what we can handle, I’ll recall you and we’ll try to think of something else. We don’t have a lot of time, though.”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re preparing to attack our command center,” she explained. “I understand it’s built to withstand an attack from orbit, so they must go for a ground assault. Hopefully, our people will be able to resist until we’ve achieved the mission objective, but the sooner we do it, the fewer casualties they’ll have.” 

They all nodded understanding, and Alice saw new resolve in their faces. She led them onwards and then up a spiral staircase. There, they split up and went in different directions. As her group approached the target, a few more dots did appear on the life sings detector: just three more, on the far side of what Alice assumed must have been the control room. The bridge would probably be on a level higher up.

They halted at a bend in the corridor they were following. The three Wraiths stood just beyond, guarding the door. Alice touched her radio receiver a couple times, signaling the second team—and, almost instantly, they heard distant sounds of gunfire. On the screen, the three life signs nearby began moving away. Alice gestured at her companions, and they bounded the corner with their rifles at the ready. It was easy—the Wraith warriors had their backs to them.

The door led to a circular room with a number of Wraith control panels and computers. As they entered, three more of the warriors were just crossing it; disposing of them was just as easy. Alice gestured at her companions to move forward to check on the other team, but before they could even reach the door, it opened and revealed Knowles and his two people.

Alice walked up to one of the panels. “I think we’re in the right place,” she said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out a tablet with some cables dangling from it and was just squatting down to try and find a place to attach it, when a loud, high-pitched, repeating sound blared all around them.

“The alarm,” Knowles called, straining to be heard above the noise. “We’ve been detected!”

Alice swallowed a curse. “You’ll have to buy me some time.”

“Yes, ma’am!” The eldest sergeant replied and gestured at his men to take positions at the entrances.

Alice didn’t look at their preparations. Cowering behind the control panel, she linked it to her tablet and began working on the hack. She flinched when she heard the first solitary gunshot, followed quickly by more rapid gunfire from another direction. Pretty soon the sound was uniform from all around her, but she kept her eyes on the tablet. They were discovered too soon—she needed at least ten minutes of uninterrupted work to find the jamming frequency in the myriad of subroutines buried in the complex Wraith system, change it, and trigger the correlative update that would carry it to the other Hive ships in Earth’s orbit. 

A stun blast hit the ground right next to her, breaking her out of the work trance. She looked around her shoulder at the direction it came from just in time to see one of her men fall to the ground with an audible thud, another already prostrate on the floor, Wraith warriors pushing in from behind them. Before she could react, the first of them collapsed in a hail of bullets from across the room—Sergeant Knowles noticed the danger and was now running towards her and shooting at the same time.

“Finish the job!” He shouted as he whizzed past her and planted himself a few paces away, his rifle never stopping for even a moment.

Alice turned back to her tablet and focused again on the lines of code in Wraith language, but she was now more aware of what was going on around her. She could hear another man falling on her left; the sudden silencing of gunfire from her right told her that there, too, the Wraith had breached their defense. Right next to her, Knowles slumped to the floor with a grunt.

“Behind you,” a female-sounding voice whispered in her ear. Alice left the tablet dangling from its cord attached to the panel, grabbed the M16 hanging from her tactical vest, and rose, turning around at the same time. She began firing at the Wraith spilling into the room, the two Marines that guarded that entry point lying flat and unconscious on the ground. A couple warriors collapsed in front of her, but she knew she had no chance; more were coming in from all three entrances.

She saw, from the corner of her eye, one of the warriors on her left fire his spear gun. She felt her body tense in expectation of the stun pulse—but nothing happened. She didn’t even manage to move her head around to look when another Wraith shot at her—but the energy blast disappeared a few inches away from her face, as if it was smoke. More shots rained towards her from all directions, but none reached her.

“Finish the job!”, the same unfamiliar voice whispered to her again. Still puzzled, Alice filed it under _to be analyzed later_ and dropped onto her knees by the control panel. She picked up the tablet, but had to look around her shoulder: a warrior was charging at her, the spear raised in his hands, readying it for a blow to the head—and then he stopped abruptly, bounding back as if he ran into a wall, just a foot away from where Alice knelt. He fell onto his back, unconscious. The other Wraith warriors wailed like a pack of wild dogs.

Alice focused on the tablet once more, her hands trembling so bad that she had trouble reading the code. She took a deep breath, trying to block the sound and the sight of warriors running into the invisible barrier that now protected her from them from her mind and steady her hands and her heavily beating heart. She was close—she was ready to send the update, if only she could find the jamming frequency… and then it sprang into view on the little screen. She jabbed it with her finger, brought up the virtual keyboard, and rewrote the code. Then, without hesitating even for a second, she hit _Enter_ and exhaled.

It was done. The modified jamming frequency would now be carried over to other Hives around. The team on the ground would be monitoring the situation, and the moment all of the ships in the vicinity of Earth copied the frequency, they would begin to beam troops aboard.

“It’s not over yet,” the eerie voice sighed in her ear. Without looking up, Alice nodded—unsure if it would be seen or not, but it appeared that whoever was helping her, they knew what she was thinking—and detached the tablet. She put it back into her pocket, stood up and turned around, hands on the rifle. A ring of Wraith warriors was surrounding her—they weren’t moving anymore, but they stood there, the spear guns at the ready, waiting for an opening. She pulled the trigger and bullets began raining onto them, mowing them down one by one. They began firing back, but their stun blasts were still disappearing into the thin air a few inches from her face and body. She pivoted slowly on her heel, methodically eliminating all of them around her. After the last one fell, she stopped firing, and the silence ringed in her ears like the loudest of noises.

She stood there for a moment, breathing heavily.

“Show yourself!” She called out after what seemed like a long while, but most likely was only a few seconds. “I know what you are!”

There was no response.

“I thought you people weren’t allowed to interfere in the affairs of the lower planes!” Alice continued loudly, looking around her as if hoping to spot the ascended being that had helped her. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but I want to know why!” She paused for a moment, but still nothing came. “Come on, I know you’re there! Show yourself!”

And then, finally, a little ball of blinding light appeared in front of her and grew, pulsating, luminous, into a silhouette—the same she had seen before showing her the way in the maze of corridors. From the brightness, details began forming—a flowing dark hair, small pale face with soft features, brilliant blue eyes, and a white robe enveloping a slim frame. Then, the glow faded and although the woman still looked incandescent in the darkness of the Wraith structure around her, she became almost flesh and blood—though Alice knew better.

“You still have work to do,” the woman told Alice in a trilling voice. “You shouldn’t tarry.”

“Who are you?” Alice asked, her own green eyes open wide as she took in the sight. Here was an actual Ancient, right in front of her. Her head was full of questions.

“Your people called me by many names,” the ascended being replied with a slight smile. “Artemis, Diana, Luna, Proserpina… and then Niniane, Nimue, or Viviane… I’ve lived many lifetimes among your kind.” She paused for a heartbeat, and continued before Alice managed to ask another question: “I am of little importance. I have done what I could to aid you, but you have to carry it forward. It’s not over yet.”

“Why did you help me?” Alice demanded, shaking her head to try and clear it of the wonder that crept up and threatened to overwhelm her. “Why didn’t the others stop you?”

The Ancient’s answering smile looked mournful. “I don’t know.” She nodded slowly. “But make no mistake. They’re watching. My time is running short—and so is yours. Your friends cannot transport their troops here. You must help them.” As she spoke, her frame began to blur and grown luminous again, until nothing remained in the flowing cloud of light but her face. “Hurry, or all will be lost.” And then she grew even brighter, blinding Alice for a moment.

She blinked, and the woman was gone. Alice could barely see anything around her, her night vision lost. Not that the ship was completely dark, but the little light that seemed to come from the walls themselves could not have rivaled the bright luminescence of the ascended being.

Hundreds of thoughts crowded in her mind. _Why would she help me? Why didn’t they stop her? This was a colossal breach of their highest law! And she said she lived many lives among us! She was a Greek and Roman goddess? I guess it makes sense—her knowledge and power of an ascended being could have been misconstrued by the early Greeks as those of a goddess… And she called herself Niniane or Viviane… which was the name of the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian realm—which means she was a contemporary of Merlin and Morgan Le Fay, who we_ know _were Ancient! Just how many of them have lived on Earth across the millennia and passed through to our myths and legends?!_

She shook her head, trying to break out of the amazed spiral of speculation. Viviane—it was the last name the woman mentioned, so Alice figured it may have been the most recent one she bore—said that there was a problem, that the other Alice and her people couldn’t beam their troops up. Why? Was it possible that the Wraith attack had wiped them out already? But if that were so, Viviane wouldn’t tell her to hurry—there must have been something she could still do…

She squatted down next to Sergeant Knowles, who still lay unconscious on the ground, and tried to shake him awake. He wouldn’t come to, though—the force of the stunner was too powerful.

“Sorry,” she breathed to him and stood up. There was no time to wait for the team to wake up. More Wraith may have been coming, and the longer she dallied, the higher the possibility that they’d find her. And then Viviane’s breaking of the rules would have been for nothing.

She reloaded her M16, squared her shoulders, and, with the life signs detector in hand, she headed back the way she came at a brisk pace. It was high time—on the screen, a phalanx of dots was moving towards the control room, but they were far enough still for Alice to find a way around them. It took her a moment to get her bearings and find a new route to the Dart bay, and her progress seemed too slow to her, but eventually she found herself in front of the door leading to where she’d left the Jumper. As it opened, she noted that the vast cavern that had previously been crowded with Wraith fighters was now almost completely empty—except for a ring of warriors encircling a seemingly vacant spot—the place where the cloaked Jumper was parked. They noticed her as soon as the door opened, and she barely managed to hide before they began firing their spear guns.

“Fuck!” She hissed, jamming the life signs detector into a pocket and picking up the M16. There was no way around them: if she wanted to get to the Jumper, she would have to go _through_ the Wraith.

She took a deep breath and swung around the edge of the entrance; her rifle spat bullets towards the warriors; they were running towards her now. She fired a couple short bursts, felling three of the Wraith, and hid from the blasts of their stunners again. _Thank fuck they’re stupid!_ She thought, her heart beating wildly. The drones did not excel in intelligence or tactic, but there were still half a dozen of them.

She inhaled again and jumped into the opening, farther towards the other edge of it this time; she pulled the trigger for another two short bursts, and then danced away to the other side of the door. Two gone, four to go; but a stunner’s blast missed her by a hair’s breadth this time, and the Wraith were closer. Much closer.

A step onto the threshold, one short round of bullets, another step and a second salvo, and the third risked as she was being carried sideways by the very momentum of her movement—and then she was safely behind the edge of the door again. Only one warrior remained now, but he was just mere yards away. She had no time.

She vaulted into the opening again, but her luck had run out; the Wraith was there, his spear already up in the air and dropping down with a whizz. All Alice managed to do was to raise her M16 in both her hands and block the spear inches away from her face. The force of the blow pushed her back, but she managed to keep her footing. And then, without a single conscious thought, all of the right moves seemed to follow automatically: she tied the warrior’s spear with her rifle and pushed it to the side. The Wraith must have been surprised with the move, for he allowed himself to lose the momentum, and Alice was able to simply grab his spear and twist it until he had no option but to release it. She did too, and it clattered to the ground, where she immediately kicked it away from his reach. This, however, gave him a second to pull himself together and attack again, this time with bare hands. Once again, Alice blocked him with the rifle—there had been no time to even point it at him—and for a brief moment they struggled silently for control. He was too strong, though, and she knew she couldn’t wrestle with him for long. Instead, she chose a good moment, released her hold on the weapon and twisted away under his left arm, pulling a knife out of its sheath on her vest at the same time. As she predicted, the warrior discarded the rifle—she didn’t know if he was unaware how to use it or didn’t want to kill a possible source of food—and spun around to face her again… right into her outstretched hand with the knife. It went deep into his neck, between the plates of armor on his shoulder and the full-face mask that served as a helmet—the only exposed part of his body.

Alice felt relief at the sight—and then a bout of excruciating pain chased away any other feeling. The Wraith was crumpling to the ground in front of her, the knife still buried in his neck, but not before he managed to drive his long claws deep into Alice’s shoulder. As he fell, his hand dragged down, too, making three yawning cleaves in her flesh, from the outer edge of the clavicle nearly all the way down to the nipple of her left breast.

She screamed in pain and jumped away, releasing her hold on the knife, and immediately teetering on her feet. She brought her right hand over the wound and then raised it to see it coated in blood.

“Fuck,” she mumbled to herself. Her legs felt like jelly and before she realized what was going on, she was down on her knees, still observing the red on her fingers. Then something happened to her vision—it was getting darker from outside in, like a vignette on a photo. She sat back on her legs, her head swimming, knowing she was about to lose consciousness—and then the Wraith let out the last, plaintive wail, and it reminded her where she was. She couldn’t faint. Not yet—she had a job to do.

Fighting back the weakness trying to overcome her, she struggled to her feet and stumbled forward, through the open door into the cavernous Dart bay. The few dozen yards of empty space between the entrance and the Jumper seemed like unconquerable expanse as she staggered through it. Seconds slipped by without meaning—they seemed like minutes or hours to Alice, all of her faltering focus on putting one foot ahead of the other. She almost collided with the cloaked Jumper. Touching its metal sides, she walked around it until she felt its slanting rear. Then, her movements deliberately slow to minimize the ripples of pain each of them caused, she fished out the remote from a pocket and opened the door. She stumbled inside and dropped onto the pilot’s seat. She hit the dial that closed the hatch behind her and became immobile. Thinking was hard, but she needed to—what did the Ancient woman want her to do? She could barely remember. The wound. She was losing too much blood, that’s why she couldn’t concentrate so much—and the pain, too. What could she do?

She made the gargantuan effort to rise from her seat, and stumbled towards the aft part of the Jumper where she knew the first aid kit was stored. She picked it up and dropped onto a seat in the rear compartment. Her left arm wouldn’t cooperate, and doing everything with just the right hand wasn’t easy, but she managed to rip open a packet of bandages with her teeth. Using scissors to cut away part of her shirt was even more complicated, and she almost fainted again when she accidentally pulled at the fabric that was soaked with her blood and almost fused to the damaged tissue. Taking deep breaths and trying to remain conscious, she pressed a dressing pad to the wound, and continued to apply pressure for a moment—a couple of minutes, she thought, though her judgment on the passage of time was pretty screwed up at the moment. Then she picked up the bandage and tied it across her chest and under her arm in a lopsided X, as tightly as she could. Finished, she had to take a moment to rest, for the effort exhausted her. She almost drifted off to sleep, only to come awake suddenly, her heart beating very hard again. There were sounds from outside the Jumper—she couldn’t quite place them, but she didn’t think it was a good sign.

The dressing did its job; when she got up to her feet, she still felt a little woozy, but it wasn’t as bad as before. She shuffled to the front compartment and sat back down in the pilot’s seat. Just a few yards from the Jumper, a number of Wraith stood now, firing their stunners blindly—and some of their shots hit the craft. Alice put her right hand (the left one still wouldn’t move) on the panel in front of her and commanded the Jumper to rise. To her relief, it did smoothly, and she floated away from the firing squad of warriors. Then she turned on the communication array.

“Flight, it’s Freedom-1, over,” she croaked; her throat was parched. After a short pause with no reply, she repeated: “Flight, it’s Captain Boyd, please respond!”

The sound of static broke the silence, and then the familiar voice came on. “Captain, what’s your status?” It was the president, but she was speaking in a hushed voice and with an undertone of urgency.

“Mission accomplished, you should be able to beam your troops up now,” Alice reported, directing the Jumper towards the bay door and activating the IFF spoofer at the same time.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible anytime soon,” the president countered bleakly. “We’re under attack. They came at us soon after we lost contact with you. They knew exactly how to enter the compound. They’ve taken the operations center. We’ve managed to hold the line so far, but there’s too many of them… We can’t win this.”

Alice felt her head swim again, this time more from hopelessness than blood loss. She bit her lower lip hard enough to bring herself back into reality. Her Jumper was just leaving the Hive ship.

“Can I help somehow?”

“Yes, actually,” the other Alice replied in a whisper. “You _may_ be able to reprogram the Jumper’s sensors to pick up the frequency we used for communication with the satellite. And then…”

“Then I’ll be able to activate the transporter,” the captain finished. “You believe we still have a chance?”

There was a moment of silence, and then the answer came: “That is our only chance, now.”

“Alright. Hold on down there,” Alice said, pulling out her tablet from a pocket. Fortunately, it didn’t need to be physically hooked up to anything—it was synced to the Jumper’s network by default—because she wasn’t sure if she would be able to get up again. _Focus_ , she told herself, bringing up the right application. It was, in itself, an easy enough task, but her concentration was fading in and out all the time, and the lines of code swam in her eyes. It took her entirely thrice the time it should have to finish the reprogramming.

“How’s it going? It’s getting a little bit desperate down here,” the president murmured over the radio just as Alice was hitting the _Enter_ key.

“It’s done. Stand by for transport.”

“Give me a minute to warn my people and then do it.”

“Alright, activation in six-zero seconds.” As she said it, a clock appeared in the top-left corner of her Heads-Up Display, counting down from sixty. _Convenient_ , she thought, putting the tablet on the empty seat next to her. For a moment, she wondered at the fate of Sergeant Knowles and the other men from her team—had they managed to wake up before the Wraith had discovered them? It didn’t seem likely—and if not, had the Wraith fed on them right away, or had they been put in a cell somewhere? She knew it was pointless to speculate, but the thought that she might have left six men to die a horrible death while she made her escape made her feel even worse than she already did.

The clock run down to zero. Alice inhaled deeply and activated the program. The Jumper’s sensors weren’t strong enough to penetrate inside an active Hive ship so there was no telling if it worked. She waited with bated breath as the seconds slipped by…

“We’re in!” The president’s voice carried a great sense of relief. “We’re moving in to secure the ships. Great job, captain!”

Alice exhaled slowly and nearly fell out of the seat. “Great. Good. I’m glad…” Her vision blurred again, and this time she didn’t fight it. She closed her eyes and immediately drifted off, nearly falling asleep. The president’s sharp tone brought her back up to consciousness, once again.

“Captain! Respond!”

“Yes, I’m here, sorry,” she babbled, straightening up on the chair; but she’d forgot about the wound and the sudden movement sent a new ripple of pain through her body. She moaned loudly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Wraith warrior and his blasted claws…” Alice groaned. “It’s just my shoulder… but I think he damaged some nerves… and I’m bleeding pretty badly… but I’ll pull through.” _I hope_ , she added in her head.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the president replied, and Alice thought she heard real concern in her older version’s voice. “Do you think you still have it in you to help us out? We could use some of those drones of yours right about now.”

Alice bit her lower lip again, tasting a bit of blood. It helped to keep the focus. She turned the Jumper around and minimized the HUD to look out the window. The Hive ship closest to her was still floating stately above her, but the two others, below, were under attack from a fleet of Darts. Alice figured those must have been the ones that had attacked the underground complex and now were coming back to reclaim their ships. The Hives ships’ shields weren’t active and they were not firing back.

“I’ll do my best,” Alice replied and concentrated. Two drones shot from the Jumper’s weapon pods. Controlling them both and, at the same time, piloting the craft to close the distance turned out to be almost too much for Alice’s tired brain, but the Wraith didn’t see it coming, so she scored pretty quickly. She decided to stick with one drone at a time, especially that the Darts took note of the new player; and although she was still cloaked, they must have seen where she fired from and were turning away from the Hive ships and flying directly at her.

She pulled the HUD back up and began a wild dance around the Darts, evading their blind, crisscrossing shots and scoring one hit after another with her drones—sometimes two or three with the same projectile. By the time she received next contact from the inside the Hive ship, she had managed to seriously thin out the Dart phalanx.

“Good job, Captain, your distraction gave us enough time to take over the ship,” the president’s jubilant voice eventually came over the radio. “We have shields and weapons and are ready to return fire, you can stand down now.”

“Oh, good, because I only have two drones left,” Alice replied shakily, feeling relief wash over her as she broke away from the theater. “I’m clear, fire at will.” She turned around to see the great flashes of light as the Hives began firing into the remaining Darts. An overwhelming sense of exhaustion was beginning to blunt her senses again, the pain in her shoulder suddenly coming to the forefront of her mind, now that her adrenaline levels were slowly decreasing. She almost drifted off again, until she felt something odd—the lightest of touches on her right shoulder. She turned around and had to squint, for her vision was once again blinded by a luminous presence.

“You did well,” said the ascended woman with a warm smile. “It’s almost time for you, now.”

Alice’s confused mind could only interpret the words one way. “Am I about to die, then?”

“No. But you have to go.”

“Go where?” Alice blinked quickly. The female silhouette became a little clearer, but she was still more of a phantom than a human.

“Who are you speaking to?” The president cut in, clear curiosity—and concern—ringing in her voice, but Alice ignored her for the moment.

“You don’t belong here. It’s time to go home.”

“How?” 

“The others are letting me help you. You have little time—the sun flare will be happening very soon.”

“You can predict it?” Alice asked, and then answered her own question: “Of course you can, you’re ascended.” She paused, her brain struggling to keep up with what was going on. “Why?”

Viviane only smiled knowingly and remained silent.

“Captain?” The president asked confusedly through the radio.

“Alice,” the younger version said, her own name sounding strange in her mouth. “I’m going home. Back to my own timeline. They’re letting me go.”

“Who’s letting you go?”

“The Ancients,” she replied simply.

“It’s almost time,” Viviane cautioned.

“I have to go now.” Alice turned around to face the control panel and the HUD. “It’s been… bizarre to say the least… but I’m glad I got a chance to meet you.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end.

“Me too. Thank you for all you’ve done for us. And… good luck.”

The Jumper was speeding up, approaching the planet beneath it.

“Yeah, you too. Goodbye.”

“Farewell.”

The little craft shook a little when it broke the atmosphere. It took only a couple minutes to reach the crater beside Colorado Springs, where the entrance to the tunnel Alice’s drone had burrowed all these months ago still gaped like a wide open mouth. She stopped the Jumper over it and turned to the Ancient woman once again.

“Why are you helping me?” She tried one last time.

Viviane sighed. “You can fix my mistake,” she replied reluctantly. “You have the potential within you.”

“What mistake?” Alice demanded, but to no avail. “How am I supposed to fix something I know nothing about?”

“You _have_ all you need,” she stressed.

Alice would have felt annoyed if she weren’t so grateful to be going home—or so tired and in pain.

“And what about them?” She pointed upwards.

“You’ve given them a chance, no more, no less. Now it’s up to them.”

“But…”

Viviane cut her off. “It’s time. I shall open the way for you. Go through now—and go fast.”

Her features blurred into brightness, completely blinding Alice again—and a blink later, the ascended being had disappeared.

 _Home!_ Alice thought with an overwhelming sense of urgency. _I get to go home!_ She uncloaked and commanded the ship to dive into the narrow tunnel in the molten rock surrounding the buried Gate; she flew as quickly as it was possible with retracted drive pods, scraping the sides of the Jumper here and there, but not caring too much this time; as she got closer, she remembered there would be an iris on the other side, but she had no idea where her GDO was now—probably with her uniform somewhere in the underground compound in Minnesota. She closed her eyes as she went through the event horizon, half-expecting never to open them again—and then she was on the other side and she barely managed to brake in time to avoid collision with the SGC’s blast door. It made it impossible to see the control room, but it was a clear indication that she was in the right place—and at least, at the point of the past where the SGC still existed.

“This is General Landry of the Stargate Command,” a familiar voice spoke on the radio, and a wave of relief washed over her. “To the unidentified Jumper, who are you and how did you get through our iris?”

She allowed herself a couple of deep breaths before responding. “This is Captain Alice Boyd. I’m sorry for barging in, sir—it is a long story… permission to land the Jumper on the surface, sir?”

“Boyd? We thought we lost you!” The general replied, surprise in his gritty voice. “Permission granted!”

She cloaked the ship again and flew up, through all the levels of the tube of the missile silo that the base used to serve as; by the time she reached the surface, the retracting roof was already open and she could fly straight out and above the city—wonderfully intact and alive with all its cars and pedestrians moving around. She circled around once at a low altitude and then put down the Jumper on a patch of open dirt just beyond the parking lot at the entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

She hit the dial to open the rear hatch and for a moment simply sat in place, feeling the exhaustion and pain mount as the adrenaline was leaving her body.

“Get up,” she told herself; she needed to get out, or nobody would be able to find the Jumper, not while it was cloaked. The effort almost made her lose consciousness, but she managed to stumble out of the ship—and then promptly collapsed onto her knees. As her body finally completely gave in to fatigue and blood loss, she saw people with guns running towards her, but her vision was already narrowing, darkening, fading… she was out before anyone got close enough to hear her last words, spoken with a breath of relief:

“I’m home.”


	6. Epilogue

A long moment of silence stretched between Alice and the President. She was looking away, down at her left hand resting in her lap, the force of the memory having reignited the ghost of pain in her shoulder. It had been the second serious injury to that same area in less than seven years’ time, but the doctors assured her that it was not as bad as the first one had been—she didn’t even need a cast, this time around, and could operate the arm pretty well even though it’s been mere four weeks since she had gotten back… She pondered the other consequences of her foray into the future for a moment. She would always be four months older, physically, than her birth certificate would suggest. She knew how she would look like at 70—if she lived to that age, of course, which wasn’t certain; she had already changed the flow of events, after all. For a time, before the timelines completely diverged, she would also have a vague inkling about what was coming—and a keen understanding of what that divergence could strip away from her own life.

“What did she mean?” The President asked eventually. “When she said that you had the potential to fix her mistakes? What do you think?”

Alice sighed. “I don’t know. At first I thought she meant that I was supposed to stop all this happening in the first place—stop the Wraith invasion on our galaxy—but now I’m not sure…” She shook her head. “The more I think about it, the more I suspect she was deliberately misleading me when she said that I _had everything I needed_. What her true meaning was, that I cannot tell.”

“And you think that’s really why she helped you? And why the others let her?”

Alice shrugged, sending another distant ripple of pain through her left shoulder. “I don’t even want to speculate, sir. It’s useless. The Ancients are very peculiar about their rules… many of them seem to walk a very thin line there. It wasn’t the first time that an ascended being helped us, but until now they were always doing it against other ascended or half-ascended—like Oma Desala against Anubis, Orlin, Merlin and Morgan against the Ori and Adria… they haven’t done anything to free the Pegasus Galaxy from the Wraith, so it’s not like they wanted to fix _that_ mistake all that much…”

“What do you mean?”

“We think Lanteans were responsible for the Wraith’s emergence as a species, either as a result of a failed experiment or simple carelessness, that we don’t know. So, conceivably, we could say that the Wraith were their mistake—one they paid for dearly when they were still flesh and blood, and one their own rules prevented them from fixing afterwards. But that’s where it gets tricky—if they had been unwilling to interfere for ten thousand years in Pegasus, seeing civilizations wiped out over and over again—why would they care if the same happened in the Milky Way?” Alice shook her head. “Like I said, it’s pointless to speculate. If I ever get ahold of another Ancient, I’ll ask, but till then, we’ll have to live in the dark.” She smiled crookedly and the President replied with the same.

“Four months in a week—that’s gotta be a little weird,” he remarked after a moment of silence.

“A bit,” Alice agreed. “But the differences between _then_ and _now_ are so great, it’s hard not to feel like it had been a dream… a very bad one, a nightmare, really… unreal, but…” She hesitated. She didn’t really want to share how real it seemed sometimes—her body reacting as if she was still there, with sweat, shallow breathing, and quickened heartbeat. She cleared her throat, and continued: “Anyway, it took me a whole day to wake up after the surgery they rushed me into as soon as they found me unconscious on the lawn, next to the cloaked Jumper. It was the middle of the night, so I spoke to the doctor on call, ascertained what date it was—you can’t even comprehend how relieved I was to learn it was 2012 again—and tried to go back to sleep. My body didn’t want to cooperate, though, so instead I asked for a tablet so I could write an e-mail to my mom, who would no doubt be concerned without a sign from me for a week—I always try to let her know when I know I’ll be away for a longer period of time… They gave me my tablet—the one I brought from 2012 into 2052 and back again. And, as soon as I opened it, it became clear what Viviane meant when she said that I had everything I needed, at least on a practical level. A simple thing, just a little note, a date, time and coordinates in space… nothing else. But I knew it must have been _our_ chance—the chance to stop the history repeating itself, of unraveling the way it did in the future…” Alice shook her head again. “There wasn’t much time, so instead of waiting for the morning like the doctor wanted, I demanded to speak to General Landry at once. He wasn’t very pleased to be woken up at three in the morning, but he came anyway. By the time he made it to the base, I was out of bed and dressed, against the wishes of the doctor, but I, uh, gave him a slip.” Alice smiled contritely. “I told General Landry only what he absolutely needed to know at that moment to be able to appreciate the need to hurry—that I’ve just come back from the future where the Wraith had come and conquered the Earth, and that I knew where we needed to be to try and stop them. General Landry is a very no-nonsense man, so thankfully he didn’t waste time to try and get much more from me. An hour later I was stepping through the Gate to Atlantis, with orders to—“ Alice stopped mid-sentence as a knock on the door interrupted them again.

The President’s secretary entered wearing an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry, sir, your six o’clock is here.”

The President looked down at his watch. “Oh, right. Can’t believe it’s this late—please ask Mr. Forrester to wait for just a few minutes, we’re almost done here.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary replied and retreated, closing the door behind her.

He turned around to face Alice again.

“Please, Captain, continue.”

She nodded. “Long story short, Colonel Sheppard’s team was off-world at that time, and so was Major Lorne’s, so I got _my_ team into a Jumper, and we went through the Gate to a planet very close to the coordinates Viviane left for me. We couldn’t wait for a 304 to reach Atlantis—instead, both the _Daedalus_ and the _Apollo_ turned around from their respective trajectories and raced towards the same coordinates. Our thinking was that we could at least get some intel before they came—but as soon as we emerged from the Gate, we knew we couldn’t wait for them. The village on the planet below us was mid-culling, with a Wraith Hive ship in the orbit, but that wasn’t the problem—for far above it, exactly where Viviane had pointed to, hung another ship: an _Aurora_ -class battleship. Some of the Darts culling the village were actually flying up to the Ancient warship, instead of the Hive; and so it became obvious to us that the ship was controlled by Wraith, that they were stocking up before their journey to the Milky Way, and that as soon as the culling was done, they’d jump into hyperspace, and we’d lose them once again.”

“So what did you do?”

“The only thing we could do. We had an advantage—in the cloaked Jumper, they wouldn’t see us coming, but we knew we could probably only fire a single drone before they’d engage the shield. We had to make it count—and so we flew right up to their hangar bay, shot through it and flew right inside. As expected, they immediately engaged the shield **,** and a force field came on in the bay, which allowed us to leave the Jumper and make our way farther into the ship—without being explosively decompressed, that is.” Alice shook her head. “We split up and made our way through the ship, targeting the bridge and the auxiliary control. Very quickly, we encountered opposition—both Wraith and humans, which only confirmed my earlier suspicion that Jareth must have been on board. My group got into a shootout on the bridge, and although we managed to damage the control chair, we were eventually stunned and put in the brig. When we came to, Jareth was there—we had a… conversation.” Alice pursed her lips, remembering the Wraith’s renewed attempt to _bend_ her. It hadn’t worked—not on her, anyway, but next to her, Perrault had buckled like a marionette… She shook her head, trying to get the image out of her mind. “Fortunately, the second half of our team was still out there, causing mayhem, and Jareth didn’t have too much time for us. He left us there, but it wasn’t long before we were released by the rest of the team. Unfortunately, by that time, _Commandant_ Perrault was already under Jareth’s influence. We had to subdue him.” She paused for a moment, looking away, then swallowed and continued: “I ordered Sergeant Karim and Doctor Cooper to get him back into the Jumper. It wasn’t an easy task—the Jumper was already surrounded by Wraith and Jareth’s men. In the meantime, I went after the ship’s hyperdrive. Now, normally, _Aurora-_ class ships only possess an interstellar hyperdrive—they’re capable of travelling within the confines of the Pegasus Galaxy. To cross the void between it and the Milky Way, you need a working intergalactic drive, such as on the Ancient City-ships, like Atlantis. We thought the Ancients did that on purpose—should any of their battleships fall into enemy hands, they still wouldn’t be able to reach Earth. However…” She sighed. “It appears that Jareth had been busy with more than his genetic research. Somehow, he gained enough intel to be able to reverse-engineer an intergalactic hyperdrive, probably from the Vanir, the only race in Pegasus advanced enough to possess such technology—aside from the Ancients and ourselves.”

“Thankfully, you managed to stop him, though.”

Alice looked up at the President. “No. I didn’t. Not at first, at least. Before I could find a good way to sabotage the drive, the ship jumped into the hyperspace. In the meantime, my team managed to shoot their way back to the Jumper. They restrained Perrault and left him inside, closing the rear hatch, virtually ensuring that nobody would be able to get to him unless they literally set explosives to it—which we were confident they wouldn’t. Jareth was anything but wasteful.” Distaste for the peculiar Wraith colored her voice so much it made the President raise his eyebrows. Alice ignored it. “It took some doing, but we eventually managed to disable their hyperdrive. The ship dropped out of hyperspace, but we had no idea where we were until I got ahold of a computer with access to some of the core systems and determined that we were already at the edges of the Milky Way.” She shook her head. “At that point we had been aboard for maybe ten hours, tops, which only confirmed my suspicion regarding the kind of drive they had on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“An Asgard—or, in this case, a Vanir—hyperdrive is only as fast as its source of power. Our _Daedalus_ -class battleships, which use the Asgard drives, can cross the void between Milky Way and Pegasus in about eighteen days—unless they’re powered with a ZPM. Then the same trip would only take four days. To be able to get to our galaxy in mere hours, the ship must have possessed a Vanir drive powered with no less than three ZPMs.” Alice paused for a moment to let it sink in. “We still don’t know where Jareth got the ZPMs from, but it explains how he was able to create a cloning facility in our galaxy—in the future, I mean. And so we knew we had to stop him—either steal the ZPMs, or destroy his vessel, including the ZPMs, before it was too late.” She swallowed nervously. “We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Jareth was a formidable enemy—we knew he’d be on top of us, whatever we decided to do. So, we devised a plan to distract him with multiple things… we planted C4 in several vulnerable places, rigged the ZPMs to blow, even programmed the ship for a collision course with the nearest star—all to disguise our true goal: to get help. I managed to hack some of his systems—that’s how I was able to rig the ZPMs and set a new course in the first place—and wrote a subroutine that, in a covert way, sent a subspace message to our battlecruisers. With the _Daedalus_ and _Apollo_ still in the Pegasus and the _Odyssey_ in the Ori galaxy, only three ships were available: the _Sun Tzu_ , the _Hammond_ , and the _Gagarin_ on its maiden voyage. It just so happened that the latter one was closest to us, and was therefore able to respond to our call first.” She sighed. “As we predicted, Jareth managed to foil each of our distraction plans—but thankfully he did not discover the message until it was too late. The _Gagarin_ began firing upon his vessel as soon as it came out of the hyperspace, but the Ancient shields, strengthened with the power of three ZPMs, held. Jareth returned fire—thankfully, he could not use the Ancient drones, since we had damaged the chair that controlled them, but the ZPM-powered pulse weapons were strong enough to seriously overwhelm _Gagarin’_ s shields. The _Hammond_ , though, we knew, was not far behind it, and we were quite certain that two 304s would manage to do the job. I gave the order to retreat to the Jumper—we had previously split up to cover more ground. Again, we had to shoot our way to the hangar bay, but as we stepped into it—and remember that it was held together with a force field, since we blasted the door coming in—something happened; my guess is that Jareth gave the order to retract the field to get rid of us. It disappeared from beneath our very feet, and the vacuum sucked out the Jumper and ourselves from the ship… thankfully the field didn’t lose its integrity immediately, but more gradually, so instead of _explosive_ decompression, we only experienced _rapid_ decompression—and that only for a second or two. Within the shielded ship, it was impossible for the _Gagarin_ to detect our subcutaneous transmitters and beam us out; but the moment we were out, they could locate us and beam us aboard. Thankfully, just before it happened, I had already de-cloaked the Jumper, so they were also able to get Perrault from inside it. He was fine—still under Jareth’s influence, of course, though without the Wraith’s near presence, he reverted to the near-vegetative state that all Jareth’s victims displayed when away from him… but _we_ weren’t all that good. Even the second or two that it took to get us on board was enough to do some damage to our lungs, swelling of our skin, and enough hypoxia to render us unconscious—just for a few minutes. Pure oxygen helped, and after I woke up, I immediately made my way to the bridge. The ship was in distress—the shields were down to maybe fifteen percent, some sections were already venting atmosphere, there were several fires caused by electrical shorts. Just before I got to the bridge, another pulse weapon shot hit it and caused a big electric discharge; the arc hit a couple people in the room, including _Polkovnik_ Shevchenko.” Alice looked away again, trying to calm her heart, beating so fast and hard it felt as if it was going to jump out of her chest. “I helped contain the situation and ordered them to evacuate the wounded to the infirmary. It was really bad—the _Hammond_ was still at least half an hour away, and we were running so low on the shields that one more hit would deplete them completely, and we would be at the mercy of the Wraith.” She swallowed hard. “But at that moment—they stopped firing, and maybe thirty seconds later, _their_ shield gave way. It was our chance—and we took it. Without their shield, we only needed one salvo of the beam weapons to destroy the ship.”

She wasn’t looking at him, but she caught the President’s nod with the corner of her eye.

“So, in the end, all turned out for the best!” He said, a smile audible in his voice.

Alice didn’t reply. She couldn’t—she was struggling for breath. What she told the President was the truth—but not the whole truth.

Because when the shield in the hangar bay gave way, only herself and Cooper were there, with Perrault inside the Jumper.

Not Karim.

Karim was still making his way back to the Jumper. They were going to wait for him. _Alice_ was going to wait for him. But it didn’t matter.

She remembered her panic when she woke up in the _Gagarin_ ’s infirmary and realized that they had left him behind. The medics wanted her to stay in bed, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t listen to them, she simply ignored their protestations and ran out. She got to the bridge wanting to demand that they dispatch a 302 to pick him up—something, anything… what she found was pure chaos, people bleeding on the ground, sparks the size of her arm flying all around. She opened the communications channel to Karim—told him to find a way out, any way… but he wouldn’t.

_You can’t survive another hit_ , he said in that frustrating, maddening serene tone of his. _I found a way to sabotage their power conduits. If the power from the ZPM’s can’t flow into their weapons or shield systems, they can’t fire or defend themselves, do they?_

She told him to get rid of the shields, that they would be able to beam him out then. But a technician piped up right then—their beaming technology was damaged, it would take hours to bring it back online. And they had seconds.

Then the Ancient ship stopped firing.

_It’s okay_ , he told her. _You know what to do._

_No_. She couldn’t—she wouldn’t. She looked around her—she was, now that the wounded had been taken away, the ranking officer on the bridge. It was her decision.

The shields on the Ancient battleship went off.

_It’s the only way. They’re going to find a way to redirect power—and soon. You have to do it. Please._

But she couldn’t. The words she had heard from her own self, forty years into the future, rang in her ears. _I don’t regret anything. And even knowing the price to pay—I’d do it again._

Images swirled around in front of her wide-open eyes. The crater where the Cheyenne Mountain had been. The thousands of decaying bodies in the streets of Washington. The helpless, unnaturally quiet people in the makeshift hospital in Baltimore. The empty eyes of a little girl hugging a tattered and dirty plush bunny.

And photos. Her wedding day, children that would never be born if she did it, years of happy, fulfilled life that would never be.

Was the price too high?

_Alice_ , Karim pleaded, the single word suddenly imbued with passion and feeling, so unlike him.

She closed her eyes just as the tears started coming.

_I’m sorry, Basil_. Her voice was just a breath, quiet as a whisper, but he heard it.

_Thank you_.

And she looked at the technician and nodded, sealing their fate—creating a rift, a change, a divergence from the timeline she had seen. For better or worse, she was the architect of a new future.

“Captain?” The President’s gentle voice brought her back to the present, and she realized her eyes were overflowing. Trying to catch her breath, embarrassed, she dabbed at them quickly.

“I’m sorry, sir. I—“ she swallowed hard, feeling a great lump in her throat “—I lost a member of my team that day. He was… he was the one who managed to drop the shields on the Ancient ship. Our systems were damaged, we couldn’t beam him out of there, but he did it anyway—he sacrificed himself and—“ But she had to stop. She was unable to continue without sobbing. Blinking hard, biting on her lip, trying to breathe deeply, she struggled to regain control of herself.

“I’m so sorry,” he replied in a sympathetic tone. He didn’t say anything else for a good while, but he politely looked away, allowing Alice a moment to pull herself together.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, wiping the moisture off her cheeks. “It’s all… it’s still very fresh. Sergeant Karim was a good… he was a close friend, and an excellent soldier. His loss weighs heavily on me.”

“I understand that,” the President answered soberly. “It weighs on me too. Ultimately, I’m accountable.”

She looked up at him, surprise giving her the strength.

“You all go into harm’s way on my command,” he explained, and his voice was gentle and full of empathy. “The things you go through every day… I read the reports and I still can’t imagine how you do it. What I do know is that, in the end, every life lost is on me.”

“We’ve all volunteered for this,” she protested weakly.

He smiled sadly. “Not all of you. And it doesn’t matter. I’m accountable—to God and to history.”

She nodded very slowly, unsure if she could agree with that—but understanding that their perspectives were very different, even though, apparently, in some version of the future that would never be, she occupied his very position.

“Well, then, Captain,” he stood up and she quickly jumped to her feet, too. “Thank you for this story. I must say I am horrified by all that you’ve told me, but still glad that you did. I hope your victory over Jareth, hard-won as it was, means that it shall never come to be.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Captain.” The President extended his arm to shake Alice’s hand. “For everything you’ve done—now and _then_.”

She smiled wanly, following him to the door. He opened it for her, and she straightened up, her cap under her arm, and nodded in lieu of a salute. He nodded back and then immediately went to greet a man who had been waiting just outside his office, and they both went back in.

“There’s a car waiting for you, ma’am. Margaret here will show you out.” The President’s secretary told Alice as soon as the door closed behind the Commander-In-Chief, pointing at a younger woman who stood at the other side of the little room.

“Thank you,” Alice replied. Following Margaret through the somewhat narrow corridors into the lobby, she kept telling herself to keep it together. There was, indeed, a car waiting for her outside. It took her to Andrews, where she had booked a room at the Air Force Inn. She managed to hold onto her composure long enough to get into the shower, and only then dissolved into a sobbing heap of tears.

She had no idea how to face her future now.

All she knew was that it was going to be more difficult than ever before.

THE END.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of part 2.5 of the series, but not to worry -- I already have four chapters of the next installment written, and working diligently on the rest... I do hope you enjoyed this part, and that you will come back to read the final one when it gets published!
> 
> I wanted also to thank once again anyone who has commented on this story -- it truly lifts my spirits when I see that people read it, and I am grateful for any and all comments and kudos. Many thanks!


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